News from betterplace.org

This week the first chrismas charity mailing hit my mailbox – a thick wad of postcards painted by disabled people with their feet. Also in the envelope was, of course, a bank transfer slip. What an awful waste! Because, as with 95% of all recipients, the mailing landed straight in my bin. On the same day, I received a message from Brian Walsh, from Liquidnet for Good, quoting an article by William F. Meehan Why we need a more efficient social capital market – and how we can get there, with some figures about the inefficiencies of the market we work in (thanks Brian for sharing): For starters, it does not have cost-efficient transaction processes, when compared to for-profit benchmarks. In the for-profit capital market, companies spend between $2 and $4 raising capital (e.g., legal, marketing, and administrative expenses) – for every $100 they raise. In the social capital market, however, nonprofits spend between $10 and $24 for every $100 they earn through fundraising (e.g., obtaining donor lists, sending direct mail, or making phone calls). Nonprofit chief executives, meanwhile, spent between 30 and 60 percent of their time pursuing donations with such “soft costs” unevenly accounted for in fundraising costs.12 Foundations and government grantors, meanwhile, spend about $12 to $19 on administration (including general overhead and reviewing grant applications) for every $100 they allocate. That means that in the social capital market, the cost of raising capital consumes roughly 22 to 43 percent of the funds raised, a dreadfully inefficient process. Together with other internet plattforms for the social sector, we are trying to stop this development by offering a cost-free (or low-cost) and much more transparent alternative for the raising of funds. Please join us in this goal: everyone who donates during the festive season to projects on betterplace.org makes sure that more money goes to projects than into the bin.

Big gifts come in little packages - Twende Pamoja is a prime example of this. Without their own powerful fundraising apparatus, Twende Pamoja has relied almost solely on betterplace.org to reap donations quickly and efficiently. As well as abundantly. Twende Pamoja is Kiswahili for “Let us walk together.” That’s exactly what a couple of Germans have been doing since the year 2000, together with their friends and partners from the east African country Tansania, on the island Zanzibar. It was here that the aid organisation Twende Pamoja was established. The project’s fundraising success is due in part to Twende Pamoja’s embrace of the full gamut of online-fundraising opportunities: the internet is fast, current, and aesthetic and a presence on the internet is inexpensive to maintain. And that’s just how Matthias Mnich, Michaela Blaske, and Verena Specht-Ronique, who placed the organisation Twende Pamoja on betterplace, brought it into being. Never before have potential supporters had the opportunity to stay so up to date or to develop with as much transparency such trusting network relationships as they now are able to with betterplace. Admitting to weakness Transparency and the development of trust require the strength to openly admit weakness. While Twende Pamoja thanked supporters for donating toward the material needed to produce cloth bags, they also simultaneously admitted that the bags were not competitive in the long run and openly reflected in hindsight that this project wasn’t especially sustainable. Ongoing Communication with Donors Up to now, Twende Pamoja workers have written a total of 167 blog posts about their seven projects; that’s almost 24 blog posts per project. News about the life of the projects have been updated continuously through the blogs, fresh information is reported as it happens, and the trusting relationships between the supporters and the project initiators are maintained. Users who are connected to a particular project as an Advocate, Visitor or Supporter, receive a prompt email from the betterplace system each time a blog post or photo is uploaded for the project. “There’s a news update on your project!” it says, and since news always serves to pique interest, a single click on an embedded link takes one directly to the updated information on the project blog. The blog entries also give the project managers the opportunity to show supporters that they are pouring their hearts into their work. Together with photos that portray the history and evolution of the project, the regular blog updates turn the act of donating into a real experience. One doesn’t only donate money or goods, but rather feels connected in tackling the project alongside the project managers. Low costs - high rewards It takes less than 20 minutes to post a project on betterplace.org. But without proper care and attention the project may wither. In order for it to grow and thrive, those responsible for the project have to put their backs into it. Verena Sprecht-Ronique has worked with Twende Pamoja since its founding and has been responsible for two projects on betterplace. She invested several hours each week to update blogs and photos and to develop the project’s network. She describes the response of her labors with one word: “Phenomenal!” Not only has Twende Pamoja won countless new donors, but in comparison to the limited fundraising opportunities of pre-betterplace-days, the organisation has now also risen in international prominence. “Today we even receive support from England–a super publicity effort!” according to Verena. As a small organisation, Twende Pamoja has virtually outsourced their Online-Fundraising and now links their projects directly from their homepage to betterplace, where they are then elaborated and evaluated by the Web of Trust. Activating networks One important key to a project’s success is to activate one’s networks. You have to hold matches under several logs simultaneously to really start the fire going. In other words: write loads of emails, exhaust the rolodex, inform colleagues, friends and acquaintances about the project on betterplace, send around the link, post it in your email signature, on Facebook, on Twitter, in your status update, tell the whole world! And be sure to remind everyone: spread the word! “But don’t forget that the project rating system is also very important,” says Verena. She remembered to ask friends and acquaintances to rate her projects with several stars, pushing them to the top of the Recommended Projects list on betterplace. Enabling the beneficiaries to act for themselves Because betterplace participation is possible wherever internet access is, Twende Pamoja decided to take their results one step further: the organisation trained people from Zanzibar on how to use betterplace.org (using laptops that were acquired from a betterplace.org project). With no more go-betweens, the shortest route between points stands wide open: the Zanzibari are now independently fundraising with betterplace for the construction of a street to a maternity ward and for an important bridge. The crow doesn’t fly any straighter than that. many thanks to Becky for the translation!

“Our purpose is to share knowledge, connect people and drive social justice maximising human potential and care in the world” Global Online Giving Marketplaces, 6 November 2009 U2 rocked the streets of Berlin Thursday 5 November - it seemed the perfect backdrop to this years Online Giving Marketplaces event which for the first time is being hosted by betterplace.org in Europe. The goal of this years meeting was to gather the world’s leading online giving players, to seek some level of consolidation, under the assumption that we are stronger and more likely to achieve our common purpose as a group than as individual platforms. The question is how? The meeting really kicked off on Thursday 5 November with a panel discussion. Hartmut Kozok, managing director of Tribal DDB spoke of the importance to bring the needs of users closer, thereby making it easier to engage them. Sachar Kriwoj, Head of PR at Scoyo, spoke about the power of the individual to be a change maker. Vikki Chowney, who represents the digital generation, shared her passion for “all things digital” and how technology can be used to mobilise social change. Daniel Grozinger demonstrated how pennergame.de (an online game where the player is a homeless person) has managed to balance the fine line between provocation and effective social awareness. And Reinier Evers, founder of trendwatching.com left us with the thought: Generation G - “ Giving is the new taking, sharing is the new giving”, and Neil Crofts then took over the meeting as facilitator of the conference, embarking the group on a journey of purpose, vision and choices. Our outcome was a clear desire to take the GOGM to a greater more global level of cooperation, with the most concrete goal to organise a Global Action Day that can be launched in each of our markets. It is work in progress, and I am sure a lot can be learned from organisations such as avaaz.org on mobilizing people to act globally. This weekend marks the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall - as a group we are persistently hacking away at the next wall to fall - poverty!

Today marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. I am currently in Indonesia, a country which – despite its many natural and cutural riches and an affluent upper- and middleclas - has nearly half its population living under the poverty line on less than $2 a day. Even though the government has been allocating increasing funds to poverty eradication (from Rp 41 trillion ($4.3 billions) in 2006 to Rp 66.2 trillion this year, the results have been disappointing with no significant improvements to be observed and no chance of meeting the MDG (Millenium Development Goals) by 2015. The Jakarta Post quotes Trihardi Saptoadi, the director of World Vision Indonesia: the governments programs to eradicate poverty have either missed their targets or have been ineffective. The fact that more money spend doesn’t mean that programs and policies be more effective, is one voiced by many critics of the conventional aid regime. Half The Sky Fortunately in recent years we have seen more rigorous and empirically based studies about the workings and failures of aid programs. Many of these are mentioned in Half The Sky, the new book by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In the words of the authors: Half the Sky lays out an agenda for the world’s women and three major abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence including honor killings and mass rape; maternal mortality, which needlessly claims one woman a minute. We know there are many worthy causes competing for attention in the world. We focus on this one because this kind of oppression feels transcendent – and so does the opportunity. Outsiders can truly make a difference. So let us be clear up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts. The Girl Effect It’s a read I highly recommend, a compelling mix of highly emotional individual life stories, both of female suffering and female agency, academic analysis and concrete policy recommandations. One of Kristofs and WuDunns main claims is that it makes sense for anti-poverty programs to focus on girls and women. It is an impolitic secret of global poverty, they write that: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending – by men. It is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a 5$ mosquito bed net and than find the child’s father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. Several studies suggest that when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratifycation and more for education and starting small businesses. …“ MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo found out that the worlds poorest families typically spend approx. 10 times as much (an average of 20% of their income) on a combination of alcohol, prostitutes, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children. … if poor people spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor children. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. One of the simplest solutions to end poverty would thus be to reallocate spending. This is evidenced in many studies: for example, Esther Duflo looked at the capital allocation of men and women in Ivory Coast. Here, men crow coffee, cocao and pineapple, whereas women grow plaintains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. Some years the „men’s crops“ have good harvests, in others it is the women who prosper. When the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have the money, the household spends more money on food, particularly beef. Other studies suggest that women are more likely to invest in education and small businesses. Duflo: „When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves.“ Micro-lending and lobbying for legal change The aid industry can do a whole lot of things to empower women economically, for example rolling out micro-landing programs targeting women. But often the change has to be on a higher level, as in the many countries where women still are not allowed to own land or inherit from their husbands (instead the inheritance usually goes to the brother of the deceased). Here aid-giving Western governments can tie money to legal reform: thus when the small South African kingdom of Lesotho applied for Millenium Challenge Money, the US pushed Lesotho to change a law according to which women were not allowed to buy land or borrow money without a husbands permission. In its eagerness to get the funding it did so. One thing I find very compelling about Half The Sky is that Kristof and WuDunn don’t make the fight against poverty sound easy. Instead they present it as a hard road, full of trial and error, often working in a highly irrational way and prone to many unforeseeable turns. This realism combined with a forcefull belief that we can make a difference in the lives of the poor and that one of the most promising ways is by focussing on girls and women, seems to me the right approach.

Teatime in a community based bed&breakfast in the Pamir Mountains, Kyrgystan Tourism, environmentalism, poverty reduction and the protection of cultural heritage don’t have to be at odds. They can even complement each other. The German Travel Association is looking for tourism projects, which not only operate in an environmentally friendly way, but are also integrated into local societies, serving them ecnomically and culturally. Do you know such projects or do you run one yourself? If so, please participate in the Ecotrophea International Environmental Award 2009. Check out the conditions of participation (btw. the final date of entries has been extended to the 15th of October 2009) And while we are talking tourism, please note, that we at betterplace.org also welcome all tourism projects which empower local communities, such as this one here in Sansibar. Please post your tourism project on the platform, as many betterplacers are interested in these projects, either as visitors or as donors. Once a few good tourism projects are presenting themselves, we are going to draw the attention of the whole betterplace community to them by featuring them in our blogs or newsletters.

The essence of our platform lies in true stories, stories about people who want to better their lives and make a contribution to their communities. It also relies on those who want to support projects by giving of their time, money and know-how in order to realize them. Our platform is a place where they can meet each other and establish contact. Photos and videos play an important role in bringing the stories and projects to life in a way that words cannot. This new means of communication provides many opportunities, but it also entails some risks and new responsibilities. If people want to promote better living conditions for others and publish other people’s personal stories on the internet, it must be ensured that personal rights and privacy are protected. Even the best-intentioned of us working on behalf of other people must still request our subjects’ permission for their lives to be publicized in words and images on the betterplace.org website. Betterplace project managers undertake to only publicize information about others once such permission has been granted. If an organization collects money for African children and writes about their project on betterplace, we will assume that permission has been granted by the children’s parents or guardians, and that it complies with our Terms of Use, which state: 4.2 The user is fully responsible … for all content publicized by him/her. Before … publicizing any content on the platform the user shall ensure that his/her … content does not violate any legal provisions, moral or ethical standards or the rights of third parties (including but not limited to copyright and trademark laws, rights of name, author’s rights, legal data protection, laws protecting minors, etc.). In particular, the user undertakes to obtain, before publicizing any texts or images, the required consent by any third party concerned, such as the photographer or the persons shown in images or named in text. But when I look at the projects on betterplace.org, the world seems to be divided into two factions. There are many projects in Western industrialized nations canvassing for support on behalf of individuals in need; most of them do so in an anonymous fashion without naming or depicting the people concerned. By contrast, the projects promoting campaigns in the South will show images of the people concerned and in some cases, provide rather graphic descriptions of their circumstances. Are those involved aware that their mother is described as a prostitute and their father as a drunkard? The division of the world into one part where personal rights are adhered to and another where they seem to be less significant has a long tradition. It reaches back to the very first contact between the New and Old Worlds, later peaking during the eras of imperialism and colonization. No matter where they live, people have an equal right to privacy. Today we know better: people around the world have equal human rights and they have the same right to privacy. There is no clear definition in this regard, however: in some countries (e.g. the USA and Australia) it is common practice to ban photography on public beaches because otherwise scantily clad ladies might find themselves in someone else’s photos – a complete overreaction, in my opinion. Obviously, perverts should be prevented from taking photos of naked children on the beach, but to put all photographers under a blanket suspicion is absurd. A platform like betterplace.org intends to enable a dialogue between people from different parts of the world and from different societal strata, allowing them to communicate on a par with each other. It should be a matter of course that the same rights should be accorded to all people here more than anyplace else.

A few weeks ago, David South, Development consultant and author of UNDPs Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletter, came by the betterplace office to take a look at our work. When I asked him how he had come about betterplace.org, he answered: he found me on twitter! So much for the twitter-scepticts. Read the article about how we can Make the World a Better Place for Southern Projects. (As the UNDP always publishes the newsletter on its South to South Website only months later, here is the link via David Souths blog)

From Michael, our CFO, I recieved this impressive message: Out of the 194 countries in the world, internet users from 188 countries have visited www.betterplace.org. Among the still unconnected are Turkmenistan, North Korea, Eritrea, Tschad und die Central African Republic.

Lorenz from anthropologi.info has written a very insightful post about yesterdays World Suicide Prevention Day. From it I learned that worldwide, more people die by suicide than by criminal acts or war - around one million per year. And up to 20 million people try to take their life every year. But this topic is hardly discussed. Neither in media (it was banned in Norweagian media until one year ago or so) nor in social sciences. The World Suicide Prevention Day … wants to “improve education about suicide, disseminate information, decrease stigmatization and, most importantly, raise awareness that suicide is preventable”. So far, the research about suicide is dominated by psychology and biomedical sciences. Committing suicide is presented as an individual issue. People who commit suicide seem to be people who for some reason no longer were able to cope with their life. There was something “wrong” with them. But maybe there is also something wrong with society as a whole or with specific current developments? Suicide prevention does not only or necessarily mean preventing people from committing suicide but also working towards a society where there are no reasons to take one’s life. But unfortunately, the current World Suicide Prevention Day campaign, as well as the International Association for Suicide Prevention focus on individual factors, ignoring the larger societal conditions which lead people to take the desperate step to end their lives.