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 stated mission is to ‘alleviate poverty,’” Mr. Behan wrote on the group’s page on the Kiva site. “Poverty is defined as: ‘the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions’. Does that sound more like the situation for US ...

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 you,” writes Mr. Pallotta, the author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine their Potential. “But you, because you have chosen ...

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 on the new interface, writes on Build.Kiva, the new Kiva API’s Web...

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 Foundation to reduce grant making this year, and the impact of the recession on Social Venture Partners, a group in Seattle whose members pool their funds and then choose charities to support.

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 will each receive $5,000 grants. All three will get the opportunity to present their ideas to senior USAID officials...

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 try to foster a sense of camaraderie among the students. The fund took that step after it realized that students were not using its Web site or responding to e-mail messages.

“For them, e-mail is kind of the 8-track player,” Peter Droege, vice...

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 potential as a fund-raising tool was the most important lesson to take away.

“What stands out to me is stories,” wrote one conference participant...

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.

According to Mr. Manis, the Mobile Giving Foundation would take a 10-percent cut of the money raised from appeals approved by and run under its...

It looks like Google might be getting into the business of providing information about nonprofit groups in one central location.

Visitors to Google Finance who enter the name of a national charity, such as the American National Red Cross, will probably pull up a page that provides a summary of the organization’s work and links to recent news articles and blog posts about the group, Sean Stannard-Stockton reports on his blog, Tactical Philanthropy.

“I think this is a game changer,” he writes. “If these Google pages resided at the top of the search results when people look up nonprofits, then these pages will become de facto home pages, but with blog posts, new stories and discussions that are both positive and negative.”

The site also allows visitors to leave comments in a discussion forum. A question Mr. Stannard-Stockton asked on the Red Cross’s page has already prompted a...

Too many of the reports designed to shed light on what works best in philanthropy do just the opposite, writes one observer.

“Either the conclusions a paper offers are so general and vague and offer such scant evidence and reasoning that they’re practically useless, or the paper asserts conclusions which are so obvious that no one could possibly argue with them,” Elie Hassenfeld writes on the blog GiveWell.

Mr. Hassenfeld is a program officer at the Clear Fund, a new grant-making organization in New York that plans to makes it findings public in an effort to promote greater openness among foundations.

In one example, he tells of eagerly opening Smarter Spending on AIDS: How the Big Funders Can Do Better. He says he expected a critical assessment that compared the effectiveness of different strategies in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

“Instead, I found a report full of...