Leslie Forman
Leslie is Wokai's Online Social Media Director. She lives in San Francisco.
This week Casey and I had the great fortune to spend four days at Stanford, learning about online giving marketplaces. This has been such an amazing opportunity to learn from other organizations, in a very personal way.
For the first three days, we met with the leaders of 16 different marketplaces from India, Colombia, South Africa, Argentina, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. As the youngest organization (and youngest participants) in the group, we felt especially honored to be included. A huge thank you to the Omidyar Network for making this possible!
The organizers brought in professional illustrator named Susan Kelly to transform these discussions into clear and colorful pictures. Here is her record of our presentation on Wokai's chapter network, part of a session in which each marketplace shared a best practice.
Over the next few weeks, we'll post more here to share what we learned about diaspora, trust, technology, communities, and so much more.
The final day the Stanford Social Innovation Review hosted a larger public conference on the same topic.
I had never heard the term Online Giving Marketplaces before this week. It's a term that can be defined in many ways, and I really like this list of common characteristics by Lucy Bernholz, who hosted one of the sessions and is writing a book on the topic:
1:1 transactions between donor/lender and NGO/entrepreneur
Transparency
Feedback loops
Donor choice
Aggregating individual transactions (sometimes for intelligence)
Two flows in the markets - financial resources and information
Financial transactions are based on trusted information
In other words, online giving marketplaces transform philanthropy, making it more accessible and more like online shopping.
And I sure hope that Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat is right when he says that "Social start-ups may prosper in downturn."
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