Future trends in philanthropy: targeted donation, wikicharity
I was browsing around WikiLeaks (a site’s that’s been in the news a lot recently - it collects whistleblower evidence and exposes it to the world; like WikiPedia, it’s collectively and openly administered and edited) for JPMorgan/Bear Sterns content. Not much there so far, except this clever investment vehicle JP Morgan has invented to allow insider trading. Sucks to be you, external stakeholder. Anyhow.
What interested me was their ‘business model’ (it’s not-for-profit, to be clear). When whistleblowers submit evidence of evil, that goes up for all to see. Wikileaks takes charge of taking that, doing additional background research on the story, and writing it up as a press release (the JPMorgan insider trading write-up can be seen here). It’s an important step in a day when newsrooms are increasingly under pressure to survive (and thus to get to stories as quickly and efficiently as possible). But it costs money. The business model is this: ‘targeted donation’ requests on the leaked documents page. Rather than generally be a supporter of wikileaks, I enable/provide direction to its work by restricting my donation to particular issues I care about (the ‘Sudan Appeal’ type of charity function, writ large, writ standard). I see philanthropy as a whole going that way, and perhaps even some aspects of business. Here’s why that’s interesting:
- The end-user is in control. That’s got important parallels to the age of User-Generated Content (UGC), in terms of inversion of production chains and relationships between citizens and their world. A total parallel would involve me being able to specify to the content provider what I want my monthly fee or advertising revenue (the money they make from beaming sponsor messages into my eyeballs), what sort of content that money should be spent on (doesn’t the free market already do this?)
- The benefits of building a brand as a general ‘doer of good’, that’s wise, sensible and cautious about what it spends money on, seems less important, than a brand as a professional, diligent, trustworthy executor of the specific (good) work that you decide it should be doing.
- Nonprofits could perhaps attract donations several times a month
- The natural way to organise for this business model would be a very flexible, scalable, open, resource flux -tolerant organisation; a loose confederation of teams able to come together (around the issues and work that gets funded), and then disperse or get rolled up into new funded work, bringing in the necessary experts each time. The Wiki model is perfect! A community of editors and content creators, collaborating seamlessly, with little or no central governor input.
Conclusion? I’d like to see a wikicharity come about. Like Oxfam mixed with Wikipedia
Related:
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