May 28, 2009
Do Online Fund-Raising Contests Squeeze Out Foreign Charities?
Epic Change, a charity raising money for a school in Tanzania, is a finalist in one of a mushrooming number of contests that enable Web users to vote for nonprofit groups. But Stacey Monk, its founder, sees a big challenge: the lack of Internet access for would-be voters in Tanzania.
“Many haven’t used the Internet before; most don’t have e-mail accounts; English is a second language,” she writes on the organization’s blog.
Given such obstacles, do Web contests disadvantage charities in places other than the United States and Europe?
Nathaniel Whittemore, who blogs on social entrepreneurship at Change.org, says yes, and he examines some other limitations of online fund-raising contests.
While Mr. Whittemore sees competitions as a positive trend overall, he says they don’t necessarily reward groups that are making the most difference. “To the extent that people are willing to be mobilized because of quality of social impact, there’s a correlation, but by no means is quality a requisite,” he says. “A lot of the young organizations that win contests, frankly, don’t have the history of infrastructure to have collected lots of robust data about their impact, anyway.”
Contests have taken on so much significance, Mr. Whittemore says, because the risks and rewards are more clear-cut than in some other types of fund raising. “If you spend 18 hours a day e-mailing, you’re likely to get more votes than the person who spends 8 hours a day e-mailing.”
He also points out that most contests are not trying to fix the problem of seed money for small, entrepreneurial charities. “Contests are designed to get lots of people to do a specific thing to increase traffic,” writes Mr. Whittemore, which is very different from trying to create a way to get start-up money to good charities.
“Hopefully, contests (and even the next generation of action platforms) are the early indications of a changing social-good-funding ecosystem,” he says, that could also include social capital markets, social stock exchanges, and new forms of relationships between nonprofit groups and businesses.
What are your thoughts regarding online fund-raising contests?
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Thanks for highlighting this issue. While many Western-led charities build large communities to support foreign causes, my concern is that organizations created and/or led by social innovators from areas of limited web access may not have a fair opportunity to launch or expand ideas if online voting is used to select social innovations for investment.
Ideablob is probably not the best example of this, as all entrants are required to be from the US. But other competitions, which seek entrants from across the globe, need to recognize that while web contests may seem somewhat democratic, limited web access in many parts of the world undoubtedly skews results in favor of those entrants that live in communities with high-speed internet connections.
Of course, there’s even a larger question at stake: who should have more say in what is a preferred solution – the donor community or the community of impact?
— Stacey Monk May 28, 03:09 PM #