Three young social entrepreneurs are taking an unorthodox approach to raising capital to help their ventures grow. They are mortgaging a percentage of their future earnings in exchange for an unrestricted infusion of cash today.

One of the entrepreneurs is Jon Gosier, founder of Appfrica Labs, a technology incubator that offers jobs, mentoring services, and seed capital to East African technology entrepreneurs. He would like to raise $300,000. In return, he is offering 3 percent of his annual salary for the rest of his life.

“A small portion of the funds would simply be used as a ‘cushion’ to help us get by in lean months,” Mr. Gosier says in an interview on the Web site of the Thrust Fund, which the entrepreneurs started to facilitate the deals. “The...

• How often are you solicited for charitable contributions each year? A donor who uses the Charity Navigator Web site kept tabs on how many mail appeals he received in a 12-month period and found that the American Diabetes Association sent 24 mailings, UNICEF and World Vision each sent 18, and the Special Olympics sent 14, to name just a few.

• With an estimate that 17 of the nation’s 30 biggest foundations are not using social media or using it in a very limited way, Mitchell W. Hurst, a nonprofit communications consultant, says on his blog that “foundations that stay on the sidelines will miss out on the substantive discussions about their issues that...

Kiva.org’s recent addition of entrepreneurs from the United States has spurred spirited –- and sometimes rancorous –- debate among people who make loans through the Web site.

The San Francisco charity has been enormously successful matching entrepreneurs in developing countries with people who want to lend them money. Since its founding in 2005, visitors to the group’s Web site have made loans totaling more than $75-million.

Last month, Kiva began testing the idea of also including U.S. entrepreneurs –- a decision that does not sit well with Tom Behan, a Seattle man who has started a group on the site called Unhappy Kiva Lenders.

“Kiva’s...

During graduation season, commencement speakers like Michelle Obama exhort young people to give back and change the world, but the reality is that they face a stark career choice, Dan Pallotta writes on Free the Nonprofits, a blog on Harvard Business Publishing’s Web site.

New graduates can dedicate themselves to charity or work for their own financial security, but they can’t do both, he argues.

“We say to students who choose charity, You must watch your classmates who chose the for-profit sector pass you by on the economic highway — buy homes in better neighborhoods, send their kids to better schools, drive safer cars, take better care of their aging parents, indeed serve on the boards of and direct the very charities that employ...

Kiva uses the Internet to match entrepreneurs in developing countries with people who want to loan them money to build their businesses. Now the San Francisco charity is asking programmers to develop new online applications to further promote its microfinance mission.

The group has created an open-application programming interface –- API for short –- through which computer programmers can request public data about Kiva’s work, which is delivered with “computer-friendly markup” that makes it easy to integrate the information into new applications.

For technology to fulfill its promise in bolstering the spread of microfinance, it “is going to take a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity, and a lot of passionate people bringing the opportunity of loans to places they’ve never been,” Skylar Woodward, the lead engineer...

The Seattle Times has started a new blog, The Business of Giving, to look at philanthropy and the growing intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit worlds.

“Business isn’t just about profit,” writes Kristi Helm, a business reporter at the paper. “For many people in Seattle, it has come to include social, ethical, or environmental goals. And these days more nonprofits are applying business savvy to achieve social change. Humanitarian organizations are borrowing ideas and methods from the venture capital world. The line between commerce and charity is blurring.”

Postings so far discuss humanitarian conditions in Gaza, plans by the Paul G. Allen Family...

A nonprofit group is helping the U.S. Agency for International Development select the winners of its Development 2.0 Challenge. The government is turning for help to NetSquared, a project of TechSoup, a technology organization in San Francisco, that looks at how charities can use Web 2.0 technologies in their work.

The competition is looking for innovative ideas on how cell phones can be used for international development in areas such as agriculture, banking, education, health, or trade.

Submissions will be accepted until Friday, and then December 8-12, visitors to the NetSquared site will vote for 15 finalists. A panel of judges selected by USAID will select the winners, who will be announced January 15.

The winner will receive a $10,000 grant, and two runners-up...

A new report that looks at how foundations are using interactive Web 2.0 technology, such as blogs, podcasts, and social networks, in their communications has been announced — appropriately — on the blog run by the Communications Network, a membership organization for people who handle public relations at foundations.

Some foundations are already embracing technology tools that allow for two-way communications, write the report’s authors David Brotherton and Cynthia Scheiderer.

The Daniels Fund, in Denver, for example, set up a Facebook group to communicate with young people who receive college scholarships from the foundation and to...

Twitter — mini-blogs updated via text message — can raise money fast from the technologically savvy.

Beth Kanter and 250 bloggers, podcasters, and other technology enthusiasts at a Seattle conference raised $2,657 to pay for Leng Sopharath, an orphan in Cambodia, to go to college this year, using the new technology — and by passing the hat at the session — in just 90 minutes. By the end of the conference, the total had climbed to $3,774.

Writing on her blog, Ms. Kanter compared the experience to her earlier efforts on Ms. Sopharath’s behalf. In November 2006, it took three weeks to raise $800, and at the same conference last year, it took about 24 hours to raise the money for her tuition.

But not everyone was convinced that Twitter’s...

Thanks to the efforts of a Washington nonprofit organization, charitable giving via cellphones may be poised to take off this year, Katrin Verclas, co-founder of MobileActive.org, a global network of activists and nonprofit groups that use mobile phones for advocacy, writes on the organization’s blog.

Giving via text messaging has been slow to gain traction in the United States because telephone carriers typically keep more than half of the money donated.

The Mobile Giving Foundation, however, is negotiating with the four major carriers to waive those fees for nonprofit organizations that run their fund-raising campaigns through the foundation, Jim Manis, the foundation’s chief executive officer, told MobileActive in an interview.