What can anthropologists do on betterplace.org?

Published February 11th, 2010 Tags:
| betterplace.org, joana breidenbach | No Comments »

SocialEntrepreneurship-HOT1

As part of my guestblogging on Savage Minds I have written up (a few parts of) the story behind betterplace.org, also reflecting on how an anthropological perspective informs what we do. I’d be very excited to get more anthropologists on the platform. Here is my call to action for them:

Although betterplace.org mainly targets the German donation market, we have projects and visitors from all over the world . Among the ways we’d love to get anthropologists envolved, let me name just 3:

  1. Tell us about organisations and projects you are excited about. We’ll contact them and invite them onto betterplace.
  2. Visit projects already on the plattform while travelling and write down your impressions on the projects betterplace-page. This helps grow the Web of Trust.
  3. Check out projects in categories you have some expertise in (health, education, good governance) and critically interrogate project managers on their theory of change etc.

Culture and Development

Published February 5th, 2010 Tags:
| culture and development, joana breidenbach | No Comments »

The US anthropology blog Savage Minds invited Pál Nyíri and me as guestbloggers. Our last post – about the role of culture for development – might also be of interest to betterplace blog readers.

Are Haiti-donations hurting fundraising for other project?

Published February 4th, 2010 Tags: , ,
| aid industry, betterplace.org, donation market, joana breidenbach | No Comments »

In his article about aid to Haiti, Alexander Glück predicted that “Initiatives that aren’t engaged in Haiti will see a slump.” We have been discussing this question as well on our team, and analysing the impact at betterplace.org.

More donations for Haiti means more donations for other projects
What we’ve seen is actually that the opposite prognosis is the case! Compared to previous months, the numbers between the 15th and 26th of January 2010 show very clearly that many people who have donated to aid in Haiti have at the same time decided to donate to other projects at betterplace.org. Once they’re on our platform in the mood to help, they browse through other projects that may not have anything to do with emergency aid and click on the Donate button!

Apparently, engagement is not just a zero-sum-game. And that makes us happy!

2009 is dead, long live 2009!

Published February 1st, 2010 | betterplace.org | No Comments »

If you happened to watch television in the evenings during December, in order to relax after a long work day, you may have noticed more than one “Year in Review” program. Well, we’re also taking the time to recap everything that happened in the turbulent year of 2009. As Joana Breidenbach already reviewed the social sector in her four part blog posts, I will dedicate this year in review more toward what has happened specifically at betterplace.org (and sorry, some links are in German!).

1st Quarter

The year began just the same as it ended in 2008: eventfully. Many exciting projects found support on betterplace.org. One such project, that we found particularly interesting, was Cinema Jenin. The goal of the project was to build a cinema in the Palestinian town of Jenin to revive the film culture within the city and refugee camp. The construction of the cinema building is now nearly finished.

Two other cool projects that we’ve promoted since the first quarter of the year, are Skateistan and Boxgirls International. Skateistan is an educational project founded as a skate school in Afghanistan. This approach had us thoroughly fascinated. The same goes for Boxgirls International, which provides women and girls the opportunity to develop abilities in the ring and further apply those strengths to their own personal and professional lives. This project is just bursting with energy.

But everyone also sometimes needs a time-out. And that applies to servers as well. It was this fact that spurred our campaign „Server down – Engagement hoch“ which we brought to life on the International Day of System Administrators. Instead of a boring “The server is temporarily unavailable” message, our banner allows webpage operators to now offer their visitors the opportunity to shorten their waiting time while simultaneously making the world a little bit better.

2nd Quarter

We received a lot of visits in April. During our Open House day, Prof. Dr. Peter Eigen, the founder of Transparency International, gave us the honour of holding an impressive speech. He elaborated on the idea of an Open House and awarded betterplace.org as a “Chosen Place in the Land of Ideas”, an initiative under the patronage of Germany’s Federal President, Horst Köhler.

That the activation of one’s own community can work like a charm if the context is right was shown this year by Pennergame. Throughout 2009, the animators for online games encouraged their members to support homeless people over betterplace.org. Even now, they are the largest Team on our platform. Keep it up!

Around the same time, we were able to announce an important next step for ourselves: the betterplace.org nonprofit will become a nonprofit corporation in the near future. This step should help us to be stronger without inflating our organisational structure.

3rd Quarter

We were of course also very happy about the engagement of actress Anna Maria Mühe with betterplace.org. In July, Ms. Mühe visited the Children’s Hospital Bärenherz in Leipzig and has been supporting it ever since. You can read about her visit on the Bärenherz project site on betterplace.org. In addition, she agreed to grace our homepage with her photo during the second half of 2009.

In the fall, the Mozilla Contribute Week took place. All those Internet-savvy people out there were challenged to make accessible their knowledge of the Internet and its possible adaptation for social projects. betterplace.org supported the Mozilla Contribute Week in Germany as the mediator between volunteers and suitable projects.

During the fashionable autumn season, we decided to try out our trend-setting capabilities. Together with the creative portal 12designer, we launched a t-shirt contest. The resulting contributions were all of very high quality. You can view the winning shirt design at Speradshirt. That’s how sexy changing the world can be.

betterplace.org is there for everyone. That’s why even large organisations use betterplace.org to collect donations. A good example of this is action medeor, Germany’s largest medical aid organisation. In just one year, they managed to collect 12,250 Euros for their work. The organisation was especially convinced to use betterplace.org because of the ability to stay very current as well as the inexpensive cost of new donor acquisition.

In the 3rd quarter of 2009, we were also able to prove that television viewing doesn’t inevitably make one overweight, ignorant and depressed. The agency “Heck-Antrieb” (“Rear-Wheel-Drive”), together with “Kropp & Ritzert Create GmbH” produced a pro-bono spot that was broadcasted nationwide. You can see the program online here, on our Facebook page, or on our profile on meinVZ.

4th Quarter

Another wonderful campaign took place in the 4th quarter of 2009. Together with eBay and the sale service providers LIMAL and DHL, we were able to setup an infrastructure allowing brand manufacturers to donate goods auctioned at retail price on eBay to projects on betterplace.org. And the nice thing is: the manufacturers and other parties agreed to forego service costs and donate 100% to designated projects over betterplace.org.

That’s how far we’d come by October 2009. Just two years since the founding of betterplace.org, we’d almost broken the 1 Million Euro record of generated donations. We’re naturally very happy about this and thank you for your excellent involvement!

Jumping the hurdle of 1 Million Euros in donations was also a timely concept for us, since we arranged the annual “Global Online Giving Marketplaces Conference” in November. Attending this conference in Berlin were 13 international online giving platforms. Together, the organisations agreed to work deeply together, planning a global campaign to move more people toward engaging online.

Just in time for Christmas, we began a whole slew of activities, such as another online Christmas Wish Tree campaign, wherein supporters could fulfill the wishes of young Children’s home residents. We crafted together an online Advent calender featuring 24 “doors” that opened, thereby providing 24 different opportunities to do some seasonal good.

Companies also use Christmas as a time to spread the cheer. Take SoftMaker for example, whose Load and Help 2009 campaign allowed users to download their SoftMaker Office 2008 package free of charge. The company donated 10 cents per download toward projects on betterplace.org, gathering altogether 6,089 Euros!

Just before the end of the year, we were able to launch the Payback Payback Donation World , enabling Payback credit card holders to donate their collected rewards points toward online projects at betterplace. Donors can see exactly what their generosity impacts. Naturally, 100% of the points are passed directly to intended projects.

Last but not least, a super story for the end of the year. A flower shop in danger of closing in Charlottenburg was saved by an initiative over betterplace.org. The initiative caused such a stir that it was even reported on by various offline media. Brilliant campaigning! It’s what we always say: stop crying, get cracking!

As you can see, a lot has happened. But we’re still far from done. Quite the opposite, rather. We are eager for the new year and look forward to more exciting stories, gripping campaigns and interesting experiences. Our transformation into a corporation will take place soon and then it’s full steam ahead! We’re still brimming with ideas…

Five Prognoses on Aid to Haiti – by Alexander Glück

Published January 20th, 2010 Tags: ,
| aid industry, emergency aid, fundraising, joana breidenbach | No Comments »

Following the catastrophe in Haiti, many donations have been made over betterplace.org for organisations that work with emergency aid, from Care International by way of the German Red Cross to the Alliance Action German Aid. Our guest blogger Alexander Glück takes a critical look at this topic. Of course, probably not everyone on the betterplace team shares his five theses, but we find it important to take a look at this particular perspective on emergency aid and we are excited to hear your responses as well:

The moment one has written a critical book about the donation market, the next moment next large donation campaigns are confirming the social giving mechanics that I have described in “The Marketed Responsibility” (Essen: Stiftung & Sponsoring, 2009). If the claims in that book hold true, then one will also have to allow the following prognoses regarding coming developments:

1. There will be new records in giving. But that won’t initially provide emergency relief.

The media tells daily of the overwhelming donation response that has surpassed all expectations, while simultaneously flashing on the screen the donation account numbers, together with strong visual images of suffering. Public heads such as Anne Will, Thomas Gottschalk and — as a columnist for the Bild newspaper — Angela Merkel, apply pressure to the already-existing call for ever-more donations — donations with as few strings attached as possible so as to ensure the most efficient application.

The problems with earthquake areas, however, are more logistical and technical in nature, as the needed resources are already in large part available. The media’s suggestions notwithstanding, a financial payment of any amount does not save a single child buried under the rubble.

2. Haiti is facing a profound structural change

The funds acquired won’t finance immediate aid, but will rather go toward initiatives for long-term reconstruction projects. Which is all well and good, except that it will never be discussed. Distribution and allocation conflicts will be the result, and without a functioning structure, unjust allocations and benefits will inevitably occur. Add to this the substantial roll of Haiti’s oligarchy, which before the catastrophe lived at the expense of the majority population, and which will in the future further attempt to allocate the funds according to such a structure. The coming changes can breakdown old structures of exploitations in order to build new ones in its place.

3. Initiatives not engaged in Haiti will see a slump

Whoever is donating to Haiti is not going to donate to another initiative. Donations for long-term aid in Haiti are now so important that, in the in the current donation frenzy, they threaten to overshadow many other equally-urgent projects; such projects will consequently see a clear decline in giving toward their causes, since after giving generously to Haiti, many donors won’t make the decision to give toward yet another project.

4. Incompetent initiatives will propagate the Haiti issue

We saw it during the Tsunami catastrophe of 2004. Fundraisers and advertising agencies crowded in to adopt the cause in order to increase their own donation profits. This will happen again, though most of these initiatives are incompetently prepared to engage this realm of aid, therefore eventually risking a considerable loss of prestige to their organisations.

5. Haiti will come more firmly under U.S. control

For the time being, the United States’ military presence in Haiti is ensuring the necessary structures to quickly and effectively distribute needed relief. The almost invasion-like arrival of the U.S. soldiers in Haiti will in all probability last for two decades and after awhile, won’t have anything to do anymore with aid to the earthquake victims.

Alexander Glück www.der-spendenkomplex.de.tt

The Ushahidi Situation Room: real-time map of the catastrophe

Published January 20th, 2010 Tags: , ,
| crowdsourcing, development 2.0., joana breidenbach, social media | No Comments »

New digital technologies are enabling radical possibilities in catastrophe situations (apart from the fact that they are able to enlist record-high donations via online donations, text-messages etc.) . Take a look at the Haiti Crisis Map from the Ushahidi Situation Room. Just in the last few days, it lists hundreds of messages updated almost in real-time, indicating, for instance the ruins containing trapped victims: “The school behind St. Gerard still has people buried in it. Unclear if alive or dead” and those trying to find missing friends and acquaintances” or “Looking for the entire Bontemps family in Haiti (Father Dr. Sainfard Bontemps).”

They describe concrete assistance from onsite aid organisations: “MSF is starting to truck drinkable water to Choscal hospital for the patients and the people nearby” as well as acute needs and bottlenecks: “St. Marc: We are receiving a lot of surgery cases. We have operating rooms, nurses, equipment but no surgeons.” Visitors to the website have the possibility to verify individual reports.

Ushahidi originated during the crisis following Kenya’s 2008 election and is an open source platform making collective crisis information accessible. On the Haiti Crisis Map, the information comes from diverse channels located onsite—from the people in Haiti who post a report on the Ushahidi website, to those posting over SMS, blogs, emails, radio, twitter, Facebook, television and list-serves.

But Ushahidi doesn’t just leave the crowdsourcing to manage itself. An active team of volunteer workers (including students from Tufts Fletcher School as seen in this video) coordinates and organises the information.

You can find an interesting interview with Patrick Meier from the Ushahidi Team on the TED Blog.

Year in Review, Part 4: Crowdsourcing – Ideas, Engagement, Trust

Published January 19th, 2010 Tags: , ,
| competition, development 2.0., joana breidenbach, volunteering | No Comments »

One trend with far reaching effects (which gained momentum in 2009) is crowdsourcing ideas and solutions for social problems. Competitions — such as Google’s Project 10100 “Ideas that change the world”, Ashoka’s Changemakers, the Purpose Prize (for people who, in the second half of their life, make a large difference), and the Buckminster Fuller Institute Challenge — make it possible to attract a critical mass of innovative thinkers and ideas, publicize them, and to effectively hone the dialogue around them.

Platforms for Micro-volunteering and Micro-work
Crowdsourcing plays a central roll in some innovative platforms launched in 2009, such as the micro-volunteer site The Extraordinaries, or Catalista, which allow volunteers to choose and carry out simple tasks, like tagging photos in an online library archive. Notably, disadvantaged groups such as refugees or impoverished populations find—over these networks, as on the Samasource platform—avenues of integration into the work process.

Mobile technology offers completely new possibilities for participation and feedback
The “wisdom of the many,” (link in German only) channelled and publicised through the Internet, will take an enormously important position at the forefront of project evaluation in the coming years. 2009 saw large scale advances linking the technology of mobile telephones with development and humanitarian work. It is now possible for mobile phone users to send information to websites that then aggregate and publicise the information. Examples of this include the concepts available from Ushahidi or SMS Frontline. These developments have an exciting potential for us at betterplace.org, in that they could considerably raise the participation that support our Web of Trust. This activation of the Web of Trust and the development of such potentials for a radically improved participation and foundation of trust is one of the areas in which the betterplaceLAB looks forward to investing our energies in 2010.

The data impetus: the Anglo-Saxon discussion of 2009. Part 3 of the Year in Review

Published January 18th, 2010 | development 2.0., feedback, impact measurement, joana breidenbach | 1 Comment »

Exciting developments in the social sector are being tracked in Anglo-Saxon countries. Those discussions will eventually also play an increasing roll here at home.

Data, Measurement, Efficacy
Following the financial crisis in the USA many organisations have, among other steps, refocused their energy toward measuring and conveying their impact. In the intensified competition for funding, only those organisations will succeed who are able to show that their labour is actually fruitful.

Lucy Bernholz, the author of one of my favourite blogs, Philanthropy 2173, has identified the following trends for the American non-profit sector:

Data dominates the discussions
Whereas organisations used to pose to themselves the question “Should we measure our work?”, nowadays the question tends to be “What should we measure?” This clarifies that the portion of administrative costs in the total budget of an organisation is not the only important figure but rather a metric that makes sense only in relation to the assessment of an organisation’s actual overall achievement.

In the last year, an entire horde of new measurement instruments have been developed and placed for use online, including Acumen Fund’s BACO, REDF’s SROI, Keystone’s Constituency Voice, and many other tools that are all summarized in the TRASI databank. (TRASI is the offspring of a cooperation between McKinsey’s Social Sector Office and The Foundation Center and offers information for 150 different tools – from questionnaires and surveys to certification protocols – all targeting the question of effectiveness among social projects).

Higher demand for transparency
Online technology makes it possible to save, structure and access data. Alongside this capability is a growing demand for transparency: if there is data, we would like to see it. That’s why, according to Bernholz, data are the new platform for change.

The USA offers an entire buffet of websites, such as GreatNonprofits, Charity Navigator, Guidestar, InsideGood, Philanthropedia, and Give Well that serve as non-profit directories as well as give an internal look into the organisations’ structures, finances and evaluations. With this basis, it has become increasingly easier to assign a ranking to the organisations and initiatives, which in turn can radically influence the stream of donations.

The new website Philanthropy In/Sight proves just how far this transparency can go with their comprehensive Google map showing in which regions and for which topics foundations and other non-profits are spending their money. In a similar vein, other websites such as Where Does My Money Go? show where public funds (in this case in Great Britain) are being administered. Giulio Quaggiotto wrote an enlightening blog post about the new demand for transparency on the PSD Blog of the World Bank.

Augmented reality
The same author writes an overview of Development Squared, the successor of Development 2.0, in which he outlines the implications of the newest web technologies (such as augmented reality, an “expanded” reality) for the policy and development sector. Insofar as it’s already possible with Google’s new goggles to identify and receive information about one’s surroundings simply by taking a photo (of a building, a house or a product) with one’s mobile telephone, it doesn’t seem a long stretch in the future to provide accessible information about wells, refugee camps or health stations.

Where is the German directory of non-profit organisations?
Whereas “Impact Investing” was one of the most important buzzwords in the USA for 2009 according to Bernholz—meaning a reorientation toward quantifiable financial, social and ecological impact-measurements—this development has only just arrived among larger German foundations, where it plays a minor roll in the choices of individual private donors. Although recent polls show that German donors would also like to know where their money has gone and what concrete difference it has made, we are still a far cry from requiring the kind of standards that could even closely resemble those that we call for in the business sector.

The first step in Germany is to establish a simple, accessible comparison of non-profit organisations. After the previous failure of Guidestar to do just that in Germany, this will prove to be one of the largest challenges in the coming years. There are however already examples of starting points in Germany, among them Transparency International’s Transparent Initiative for the German Social Sector, followed by catalogue of disclosure requirements that we hope will gain broad acceptance.

In Part 4, the last of these year-in-review posts, I will address new developments in Crowd sourcing. And – again many thanks to Becky for translating my German “2009-in-review”-blogpost!

Year in Review 09 – Year in Preview 10 – Part 2

Published January 12th, 2010 Tags:
| joana breidenbach | No Comments »

At betterplace.org, we are naturally interested in the changes that digital technologies have affected on the social sector.

Online fundraising continues to develop but remains in the small numbers
In 2009 many German organisations discovered the potential of social media for furthering their aims.  For the first time, fundraising guides explicitly added “Online Content” modules to their demanded courses.  Small and middle-sized associations and foundations have meanwhile found that a website is indispensible, while large aid organisations have hired on Internet-specialised communications experts and brushed up old websites. Many German fundraisers signed onto twitter and facebook for the first time this year, and 2010 will see the first large-scale online campaigns to strategically gauge this potential for younger donor groups.

Still, in Germany we are light years away from collecting truly significant gains over the Internet in contrast to in the USA, where just last month a call for help for 3,200 non-profits in Minnesota received 14 Million US$ within just 24 hours. Here in Germany only between 1-3% of donations are made online.  At a renowned, multi-day conference on the topic of “Why do we donate?” in the scientific centre of Berlin, only one single presentation (mine) was offered on the topic of Online Fundraising. Despite the great successes achieved by German online donation platforms such as betterplace.org or helpedia, we have collected altogether in one year less than Just Giving collects in only two weeks, as the founder of helpedia, Sebastian Schwieker critically pointed out. (In 2009, Just Giving became a definitive household-name and clearly broke the record in the 500 million pound donor market).

Still in the learning process
In this sense, we at betterplace.org found 2009 to be the beginning of important learning processes for organisations and platforms. Increasingly, we grappled with serious discussions about how the Internet alters fundraising from and communications with donors. We want to share our learning process with everyone: for example, through our Good Practice Case Study, and the soon-to-launch Online Fundraising Toolbox.

As to how enriching and unlimited the engagements through social media can be, the impressive last days of 2009 are self-evident: in the course of 18 days over twitter, facebook and blogs, a small Berlin flower shop received the necessary 10.000€ needed to keep its doors open. Calls to action such as this mobilize a completely new group of supporters—people (including so called Digital Natives) who, while not feeling at all compelled to join in an annual “Week of Civil Engagement,” are ready—with their knowledge, money and networks—to support social justice actions online.

In Part III of the Year Review, we will address issues of transparency and development 2.0.

What happened in 2009? What will happen in 2010? Part 1

Published January 11th, 2010 Tags: ,
| aid industry, joana breidenbach | No Comments »

At the end of 2009 we published a 4-part review of the past year, combined with a look ahead to things coming to betterplace.org and within the social sector in 2010. Thanks to Becky in the betterplace team, we now have a translation:

Donations decreased only slightly despite the crisis
Initially there was much speculation in 2009 as to how largely the economic crisis would affect donor activity. In contrast to the situation in the USA, where in 2009 the average donation received was only half of what it was in the previous year, and almost all nonprofits reported grave financial losses, the financial crisis in Germany had (at least in the first half of 2009) a much less negative impact on the volume of donations overall. Donation incomes were indeed slightly decreased – the executive committee of the German Spendenrat figured 5% fewer donations related to anxiety over job loss and lower returns on investments by retired persons.  The decrease in donations seems mainly to be the result of untypically high incomes due to natural catastrophes in 2008 in Birma and China, Pakistan and India, but also because organisations in 2009 sent fewer (expensive) donation request letters and received correspondingly fewer earnings.

Donors preferred smaller organisations
More Germans preferred to donate to smaller non-profit organisations this year rather than to the “usual suspects.”  This trend was documented by an experiment at the Center for European Economic Research (Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung – ZEW) in Mannheim. The test involved 223 participants between the ages of 18-75 chosen to represent the German population. In the lab, participants made actual decisions about donating (in the mostly standard survey, test participants only answered hypothetical questions rather than donating money themselves).

In 73% of the cases, small organisations were preferred to large ones (small was defined as organisations earning between 40.000 and 300.000€ per year). Only 27% of participants selected larger Institutions. Behind these results is a crisis of trust: many donors are asking themselves whether their donations to large organisations disappear in the cloud of administrative and consultant honorarium expenses rather than in the work of directly eliminating social injustices. In accordance with the Spendenrat, donors today demand more clarity and insight directly into the projects and balances. (Now, we should stress that transparency in smaller organisations in Germany is not per se better than that in larger organisations, and that administrative costs are necessary to further good work. This is rather a question of the relativity and quality of the achieved work).

The trend toward smaller nonprofits coincides with a general trend in other branches. Music and bookstores have likewise experienced the replacement of the mass market by a swarm of digitalised niche markets.

Online bookseller Amazon’s many sales of poorly circulated niche books—scientific essays, poetry collections, memoirs—far outweighs their sale revenues from the few annual bestsellers.  For the social sector, this implies that the small sums that you or I donate to a local association in Brandenburg or to a social project in Mozambique have a more significant impact than the funds that are given to large, well-known aid organisations.

In 2010 the “long tail” of aid will become even more meaningful
More and more users will visit platforms like betterplace.org, global giving or Help India with the aim to find relevant organisations to match their interests. Nowadays platforms give small and middle-sized organisations more visibility than previously. But even large aid organisations can gain committed donors by clearly depicting their work and transparently accounting for their use of funds.

At the same time, local projects will continue to gain increased significance, as was already shown in 2009. In this time of crisis, people are working much more on-site: at the source of the need and where, if in doubt, donors can drop by to check on a project’s work and to be convinced of its value.

In Part II of our year review, we will look at the changes that digital technologies have in the social sector, and at the development of online fundraising in Germany.

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