A bit away from digital, but I’ll follow this up with a digital focused post in a while.
An article in professional fundraising says that intelligent giving has ambitions to turn itself into a Which? for charities. It wants to measure effectiveness – the impact that a charity has – so that it can say which organisation an individual is best investing in.
One of the main ways it proposes to do this is by talking to beneficiaries, as well as experts in the field.
Despite the obvious methodological difficulties of any study, this may be achievable for the UK. But such a system is completely unrealistic for international development.
Is Adam Rothwell really advocating that he will fly around the world, speaking to thousands of beneficaries in hundreds of countries about how charity x or charity y has improved their lives? The time needed to assess an organisation like Oxfam is mind boggling.
Even putting aside the resources required, there are good reasons to suggest a survey wouldn’t be valid, because poverty covers not just material wealth but also social capital. It’s not just a case of counting schools and talking to happy community members – issues are complicated and involve rights and social development with intangible things, like confidence.
In my job I was lucky enough to visit work in Malawi and speak to a community where the charity was phasing out its work after 10 long years. Big changes had been made, a new school, a well, a co-operative for food production. But when I spoke to the community members they were scared. They didn’t want the organisation to leave because they felt they weren’t ready – they had never had to run a community co-operative on their own before, and be truly in charge of their own development. The organisation’s staff were confident that the community could go it alone – like a bird learning to fly they just needed to take the plunge. But to an independent observer, who do you trust in this situation? The community members who are scared, or the organisation’s staff?
Intelligent giving’s aspirations are admirable – trying to see which organisations are effective is really important. But this idea seems pretty half baked to me.
I’ve been reading a bit recently about See The Difference, a new web venture nicely summed up on Bryan Miller’s blog. Essentially, it is a new charity aggregator which promises to revolutionise the charity market through it’s use of video to recruit and feedback to donors.
I think it will fail for 2 reasons:
Some are making comparisons with Kiva. But there is a fundamental difference between this venture and other already existing charity aggregator sites, such as Global Giving. Kiva facilitates the interaction between individuals. The old addage is as true today as ever. People give to people. People do not give to projects. They don’t give to “funds”. They give to make a difference to people. Kiva knows this and does this very well. Charity aggregators haven’t done this very well so far, because they focus on aggregating projects – not on aggregating individual need.
Secondly, video online isn’t new. Other charities are out there already using it to excellent effect telling their stories in real time. Charity:water, child’s i foundation and learnasone are all using video to tell stories direct from the field. They’re broadcasting their message across multiple platforms of twitter, facebook, blogs and other social media. They don’t need See The Difference. All it could ever be to them is an expensive shop window, but looking at the success of charity:water, charities can do perfectly well without this extra layer getting in the way.
Tags: charity, charity:water, child's i foundation, learn as one, principles of fundraising, see the difference, social media
International development, charity, digial, social media | admin | 
May 7, 2009 2:43 pm | 
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Image of superman by Adrià garcía
A bit of a shameless plug for ActionAid’s Mega Mouth campaign. Go and get involved!
But not too much of a shameless plug, because it’s really good.
A real life super hero, Mega Mouth, is walking around London in the run up to the G20, gathering messages that he is then going to shout out at the Put People First rally this weekend.
People can submit messages for him to shout on the ActionAid website or via Twitter. The Twitter campaign is really good – there’s an almost constant stream of updates as Mega Mouth walks about and they make a real point in following everyone who follows them and sending them a message encouraging them to get involved.
What’s even better is the use of Qik to show Mega Mouth’s progress around London – live! Qik is a video broadcast service that lets broadcast, in real time, footage you shoot on your mobile phone.
I’ve had a play around with it and it’s really good. Only problem I found was that it did take a while to stream and it kept having to buffer the content that I was viewing, but I’m sure they’ll get this sorted.
It really opens up a lot of opportunities – especially for citizen journalism and the ability for people to publish their own content. The boundaries between traditional broadcast media and the “new” communications tools are being broken down even further.
Found this (via brand republic). It’s a campaign run by an India women’s group who are mobilising on Facebook against a male religious group who beat and assualt women for visiting bars. They’re getting support to a group and then asking the group members to send a pair of pink pants to the Male organisation that is involved in the attacks.
It’s really interesting to see civil society in developing countries really latch on to new technologies, and in particular social networking. Much has been written about mobile use in Africa and how this has by-passed fixed line use. I think the same will happen with campaigning and development practice in developing countries.
I’m waiting for the first digitally-led development organisation that uses social networking tools, technologies and principles to drive its work to spring up soon (if one hasn’t already?). My guess is that this will happen first in India as adoption of social networking and digital is already quite advanced (see the twittering of the Mumbai attacks).
Anyone know if any charities like this exist already?
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