09.15.06
Use technology to give back more
One of the areas my wife and I spend more time this year is to think about how to give back more. We decided to create a charitable foundation and start to discover the challenges of finding right charities to support. In addition to many decision criteria, one of the dimensions we look at is efficiency. Average charity spent 10 cents to raise $1 in contributions. A stats from Charity Navigator mentioned that average charity program spend 7% - 10% for fund-raising and 12% percent for administrative costs. So 20% cut right of the top on the money that is not used for the program, more on the SG&A (in corp term). I notice a few charities with efficiency of less than 60%.
I believe that with today’s technology infrastructure maturity and adoption, we should be able to do better than that. There are some companies providing technologies and services to help in this area such as Kintera and Sage Software. It would be great to see more people really leverage technology to allow more dollars to flow to the bottom line. Let’s think more on the social venturing, maybe some good startups can come of this…
garageguru said,
September 15, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Well.. www.google.org is definitely a great step in that direction. What is interesting to note is the growth of online microfinance institutions .. www.accion.com used to do this on a large scale. These institutions are metamorphosing from non-profits to for- profits.. Do good , get rewarded too..way to go..
Ray Wu said,
September 15, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Thanks for the feedback. I definitely like these microfinance organizations. Startups like Kiva.org or Prosper are all good examples of using technology to enable better commerce and enable people to help each other
Boundaryfree » Donate to China earthquake said,
June 3, 2008 at 7:13 am
[…] I have always been an advocate of donation efficiency. It took me a while to find a few donation services that pass 100% of the donation back to China. The one I decided in the end is Silicon Valley Tsinghua Network that is run by about 15 volunteers who are helping all donation and website details. So I donated a few thousand bucks for this effort and hope you can join me to help relieve the suffering just a little. 60K+ death and counting, what a tragedy! There is an incidence where a school building collapsed and every student died. Thinking of this makes my heart ache as I know how sad it is to lose a loved one, especially a child. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]