News from betterplace.org

It took place at noon on Thursday, 2nd of July 2009 in the former “Milchstraßen” publishing house in Hamburg. Seven representatives of the national media gathered in our Hamburg office. Everyone was greatly excited because our new partners were to be announced: Bernd Kundrun, Arno Mahlert and Oliver Grün are three new partners of betterplace. At the turn of the year betterplace will be transformed into a non-profit stock corporation (“gemeinnützige Aktiengesellschaft = gAG”). Now everyone is probably wondering – why? The opportunity to take a stake offers these partners the chance to share the success of betterplace and even to multiply it in future by combining forces. Personalities from the economy, media and society are expressively invited to actively shape the future of social commitment – a call that Mr. Mahlert, Mr. Kundrun and Mr. Grün have followed. We are delighted to WELCOME them! Arno provides us with his experience from his time as entrepreneur at Tchibo and Beiersdorf and makes his network available. Bernd supports betterplace by actively collaborating, by his contacts in the media sector as well as with a huge contribution from his private assets. As a specialist for fundraising of aid organisations, Oliver will bring the Internet domain “spenden.de” along with software capacities into the gAG. Needless to say that the betterplace gAG will not pursue any profit maximisation but will remain a charitable (!) “company to improve the world”, meaning that the only return of all parties concerned is a better world – and no money. With young bloods, the additional know how, lots of teamspirit, and the new effective synergies, we will have the chance to expand our field of activites. This will happen in form of the new „betterplace Lab“. The aim of the lab is to constantly improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of the donation process. Furthermore, because of the integration of “spenden.de”, for the first time it is possible to donate directly for global budgets of organisations, and not only for charity projects. “spenden.de” will be a second platform, ran by a separate team, but we can benefit from synergies in the common admin-interface. By the way, in the course of the restructuring there will not be any changes for the betterplace.org-Users. The donations will be forwarded as it was in the past – 100% are forwarded to the projects. More details about the “Lab”, about “spenden.de” und about the gAG will be published and discussed here in our teamblog in the forthcoming weeks and you all are invited to take part in the discussion. Thanks to our new partners we can achieve much more now. But to be well prepared for all these new challenges we were in the need of more energy – so we all met at a huge grill filled up with good vibrations to use the momentum of doing good. We had tons of great salads, we had very delicious beef and sausages, and of course we had a few bottles of beer. Cheers to this eventful day and cheers to all you guys who took part. We say thank you to all who supported us and helped out to make this day so successful.

In contrast to all other comparable donation plattforms, betterplace.org is open, i.e. everybody can post a social project, regardless of whether the project managers organisation is recognised as charitable by the German tax authorities or not. In fact – our enthusiasm for a few small NGOs, unknown in Germany, led to the creation of betterplace, as we wanted to give them a broader support base. Openness creates diversity and momentum: on betterplace we also especially welcome approaches using entrepreneurial methods for poverty alleviation and social justice. Many of which are not charities, even if they need starting capital via donations. At the same time we want to encourage private inidviduals to become active changemakers and use betterpace as a free-of-charge tool to raise support for their causes. And finally, there are so many amazing foreign NGOs, which have simply not registered for charitable status with the German tax authorities, because their support base is elsewhere, in Nepal or Columbia. Yet openness also creates a risk: the official stamp of the German tax authorities may only be a very technical and limited guarantee, that the money is being spent on the stated goals of the organisation, but it is a guarantee nevertheless. betterplace.org is an enabler, matching givers and takers, donors and beneficiaries. We strive to built a transparent system. A system in which you will have to judge for yourself which people and organisations to trust and which not. Of course, you will also find „bad“ (i.e. ineffective and even counterproductive) organisations trying to raise money online. But according to our 18 months long experience, the chances that people donate to those on betterplace may actually be smaller than in the „normal“ offline world. Because as readers of this blog (or of William Easterly or Danbisa Moyo) will know, there have been a good many bad development projects around for a long time, projects financed by our taxes and private donations. Now, with a plattform such as betterplace.org, there is a whole range of new projects easily available. In order to help donors find the projects they can trust we are counting on three different trust mechanisms (and this is not counting the increasing number of technological tools used in order to stop potential fraudsters right at the beginning, i.e. when they are posting a project.) Three trust mechanism The current Web of Trust, depicts 3 different kinds of trust. There is, first of all, „institutional trust“. This is evoked when the German tax authorities grant charitable status to an NGO. In addition there are certifications such as the DZI Spendensiegel and the reputation of a brand such as Misereor, The Red Cross/Crecsent or UNICEF. Secondly, there is personal trust, the trust which develops because a friend, collegue or family member recommends a project. We know from donation statistics that a significant number of people donate after somebody close to them has asked them to do so. And thirdly, we have trust created by „swarm intelligence“, an evaluation of projects according to the discussions and ratings of a large number of people. We see this already forming on betterplace.org: active projects, which have many visitors, donors and advocates are receiving more donations than other, more passive ones. Success creates success. This last type of trust can be greatly improved. Participartory web 2.0. technology will give an increasing number of people a voice (people, who haven’t had a voice before, because they are far away from the donors and have little financial and social capital). These new voices will help us detect fraud – has the school really been build? And measure effectvity - Did the workshop really help migrants? (more on this and what we at betterplace are doing to optimize the web of trust, in a later post) Well informed donors In the betterplace team we have an ongoing discussion about the kind of tools donors need in order to make an informed choice. We are also asking ourselves whether our communication with betterplace users is sufficient. Do you, as a user of betterplace, know that you are on an open plattform and that we don’t check the projects ourselves? (we do check though whether an organisation claiming to be charitable in Germany is so, as we hand out donation receipts). Do we sufficiently disclose the self-regulatory nature of the plattform? And do we stress that you as a donor are responsible for making the right donation choice? A few days ago we decided to be more explicit and included the following sentence under each project: betterplace.org is an open platform on which anyone can upload their project. This project is recognized as charitable by german tax authorities. We recommend that you support this project, especially if you know the project responsible, an advocate or visitor to the project, or perhaps you know the organisation, or a friend has recommended it to you - and because you feel that the project is meaningful and worthwhile supporting. What’s your opinion about this? Is it a helpful reminder that we at betterplace are responsible for the running of an efficient and sensible infrastructure, whereas you – the potential donor – is responsible for a good and sensible choice of where to allocate your Euro? Or does this sentence look to you rather like a disclaimer, like the small print of a medication, warning of its potentially harmful sideeffects? Are we distancing ourselves too much from what are, in all likelyhood, well-intentioned and good projects, worthy of our support? We’ll be coming back to these questions over the next couple of weeks and would very much welcoime your feedback. What is your gut reaction to the sentence? Do you find the message useful or does it turn you off? Which alternatives would you recommend? We are looking forwrd to your feedback!

This years Hasso Plattner Venture Forum in Potsdam, titled “Crisis? Don’t miss the chance!” ended with a speakers dinner in the beautiful garden of the “Haus am Waldsee – A Place for the Arts” gallery. As with many big events it is often the “personal encounters” that leave the biggest impact. One of the guests told a story of how a stranger had once given him a book, “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz, whilst traveling through an airport. The book serves as an inspirational code for life: Be Impeccable with your Word Don’t take anything personally Don’t make assumptions Always do your best The day’s event was an information overload. Many inspiring individuals speaking about crisis on all fronts and how each may have applied such a code to turn their crisis into opportunity: Josef Ackermannand Ketan Patel spoke about the global response to economic crisis. Ketan Patel, stunned the audience with his words, as if creating reality, as he predicted the future in 2040. Herbert Nitsch is a world champion free diver, who has trained his body to overcome the crisis of having no oxygen at over 200 meters below the surface of the ocean. He allows no person to distract him, in the moment taking nothing personally, before surrendering his body to the ocean depths. Mel Young put into perspective the reality of how football can bring homeless people off the streets to live constructive lives. Mel spoke of the (mis) assumption that the poor, drug and alcohol addicts etc who as a result become homeless cannot become valuable contributors to society. Britta Steffen, two times Olympic Gold Medal winner spoke of having to confront the crisis of injury, and how using a personal coach helped her visualize and therefore achieve her success. Despite her injury she continued to do her best, and therefore continues to break her own world records. The Hasso Plattner Venture Forum once again successfully gathered many inspirational leaders from a broad spectrum of fields, who all follow some sort of “code” in their lives, which has helped them in confronting and interpreting crisis on many levels.

A refugee is a person, „who owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.“ (Art. 1, Geneva Convention on Refugees) A description which sounds very abstract on the first sight. Because being a refugee means much more than just living in another country: It means beeing torn out of your familiar environment; It means to leave all the things behind which have always been near and dear to you; It means to be forced to abandon friends and family while having no guarantee to see them ever again; And it means to be confronted with an uncertain future and the inability to determine your own destiny. Today’s World Refugee Day is dedicated to the about 40 million people worldwide, who currently are in such a situation. For the first time, this world day of migrants and refugees was proclaimed in 1914 by pope Benedikt XV. against the background of World War I. Since this year the World Refugee Day has been celebrated in many countries annualy, but the exact date of the exercises differed from region to region. In 2001, finally, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed June, 20th, to be the official World Refugee Day. This day is supposed to honor the hopes, dreams and desires of all refugees – and, at the same time, to communicate that they won’t ever be forgotten. This year’s theme of the World Refugee Day is ‘real people, real needs’. On betterplace.org you can help to fulfill the ‘real needs’ of many refugees worldwide. For example you have the possibility to support two projects of the German relief coalition „Aktion Deutschland Hilft“. The first project collects donations for refugees in Darfur(West-Sudan), where about 4 million people presently are in the need of supply by aid organisations. The second project is about helping refugees in Sri Lanka, who are forced to leave the hard-fought areas in the northeast and to move to southern regions. The claim of both projects is to guarantee the availability of clean drinking water, to improve the sanitary state of things and to ensure primary health care. But also those refugees, who already managed to move to another country, still have to face severe problems to accommodate themselves in the new environment. Namely they are confronted with language barriers, as well as the complicated and often grueling procedures to fulfill the requirements of the authorities. Furthermore they have to deal with a completely different culture while often beeing traumatized by the experciences in their home country. The human rights organization XENION in Berlin helps exactly these persons by initializing a mentoring programm. On betterplace.org you can support the work of XENION, too.

Noa Lernerand Holger Schmitz will be presenting their work on the sanitation project for the bottom of pyramid market, which we started a year ago together with the WTO. You are all welcome to join us in our office. Just drop us a note, i.e. write a comment below.

Certainly, we do not want to invite webmaster to shut down their server. But in the event that an online platform has to go offline for maintenance, system administrators may now enable their visitors to do good using betterplace.org in the meantime. Simply include the following banner: Of course, the banner can be linked to your profile on betterplace.org. Find the banner here or simply copy and paste the html code below to your maintenance page! Maintenance

Today, on June 8th, 2009, we’are celebrating the first official World Oceans Day themed „one ocean, one climate, one future“. Since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, several countries celebrate this day annualy, but, however, its official designation by the United Nations took until December 5th, 2008. World Oceans Day is an opportunity to honor the world’s oceans and thereby the awareness of oceans as an (or maybe even „the“) essential source of life shall be raised. Oceans cover approximately 70% of our earth’s surface. They generate most of the oxygen we breath, are essential to food security and power our climate. With the climate change contemporary society has to face unprecedented challenges concerning oceans and their biota. Consequently many sea dwellers do not only have to face the dangers of overfishing, bycatch oder increasing water pollution, but also the threat of their habitats as a consequence of climate change. For instance, the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) expects Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to be damaged up to 95% until mid-century as an effect of the slow acidification of oceans and the permanently increasing water temperature. Undeniably, the oceans are not only worthy of protection but also in need of it! Those who want to contribute their part to the sustainment of the marine diversity of species have the possibility to support a project run by the German association Action Campaign for Endangered Species (ACES)for the protection of ocean turtles in Anamur (Turkey). The beach of Anamur ist one of the major nesting beaches of the so called loggerhead sea turtle. The protection of this beach is very important because for egg deposition turtles usually return to the beach on which they once hatched. Now the destruction of the beach due to road constructions, bright street lamps and increasing coast pollution has to be avoided. Therefore a focussed publicity accompanied by the assignment of game wardens is needed. For the implementation of this project we search for monetary donations as well as donations in kind, like old cell phones or 100 serviceable items to be auctioned on ebay. The revenue of the auction will benefit the turtles again. But furthermore there are several other possibilties on betterplace.org to support ocean protection. For example you can donate for a project initiated by the foundation OroVerde to create perpetual sources of income for the inhabitants of Batana, Indonesia, which also helps to prevent the destruction of coral reefs around the islands due to man power. Another alternative is to adopt a sea dweller, as for example the female sperm whale „Pinchy“ that lives near the coast of Dominica. The donations will exclusively be used to finance a protection project for the spern whales of Dominica.

Since the beginning of this year, as we started actively approaching aid organizations to present their work on betterplace, I have had many conversations with fundraisers and project managers. In these discussions I am trying to find out how to improve the interface between betterplace.org and organisations of differend sizes, from small grassroots initiatives to large, international aid organisations. We obviously want many organisations to use the plattform, as we offer our services free of cost and enable organisations to lower their fundraising costs. Lower fundraising costs means more money can go to where donors want it to go: to the project. Projects and needs – an illusionary world? On betterplace.org donors support specific projects, broken down into even smaller needs. Project managers are asked to keep supporters up to date about the progress of the project and inform them once the financed need has been realized. This procedure is not without its critics. Organisations, especially large ones, are used to work with global budgets, which they allocate according to their internal dynamics. They tell me: „This is not how we work. The donations we collect in Germany are handed over to our international headquarters and they forward them to the projects. We only hear once a year about what has been done with them in the field.“ Others remark that their budgets are so huge that no way can they give feedback about the realisation of specific needs. After these discussions I am sometimes asking myself, whether our demand for greater transparency is so much at odds with the workings of large organisations, that we are in danger of creating an illusionary world, whereby organisations post a project in „the betterplace-way“, but can’t honestly deliver what we are asking them to do. For many (I would say most) organisations and initiatives on betterplace.org our approach is no doubt working fine. A grassroots initiative sich as Cecil Kids Center in Mombasa doesn’t have any funding sources outside of betterplace. The project volume iss mall and tasks such as the building of 2 latrines ort he renovation of a classroom can be broken down nicely. Once the donations have come together, the work can start and a few weeks later, donors receive a message in the form of a blogpost by the project manager, accompanied with photos, that the project has been finished. Large NGOs on the other hand have many different sources of funding. The fundraisers who present the organisations projects are located far from the field and might themselves get only irregular and indirect information about the progress of the project. Is betterplace only suitable for small grassroots initiatives? Is the betterplace way for these latter organisations only a marketing tool, used to get donors to open their pockets, as donors prefer to contribute to specific tasks and needs rather than to large global budgets? I believe, not. Even a huge social project has a budget and knows what will be needed for its realisation. And there is no reason why a huge transnational NGO shouldn’t be able to inform its donors in word and image, what has been accomplished with their help. (and some large organisations used betterplace wonderfully in this way). Let’s take a random project on betterplace, A winter proof house for Tadzhikistan (btw, a project I find really worthy of our support). Of course it would be wrong for donors to assume that once someone has donated 70 Euro for a door, the organisation will go out and use this very money to buy a door. But what I can expect as a donor is that a door will be bought as part of the project realization and that the organisation will sent me proof of this purchase by posting a picture of the houses built. The difference donors make, should be made visible That’s what ist all about: people who contribute to a project with money, time, expertise or donations in kind, have a right to know what happens with their money. They have a right to see the difference they help to make. Of course, this is not always possible. A number of poverty alleviation measures and programmes don’t have quick and visible results, their impact can only be measured over a longer period of time. How do you want to measure improved self-esteem? But in many cases visible proof is possible. When I have contributed to the building of a classroom, that classroom can be documented and the success of the project measured. Too many well-intentioned aid projects fail. Last month, on my trip through Usbekistan, I heard about a number of large projects, financed in the 1990s by the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) which simply evaporated, as the money went into the deep pockets of corrupt politicians and businesspeople. Transparency and communication fight corruption Transparency openes up the blackbox „aid“ and fights corruption. Let’s take the case of an organisation in Cambodia which lists on betterplace what will be needed for the construction of a new internet cafe. They break down the project into cement, stones, doors, windows, electric systems, laptops etc.. Now other people on the plattform, with intimate knowledge of the local, cambodian construction scene, can come in and comment on the prices beeing listed and disclose if they are „real“ or include major kickbacks. Transparency is more often than not a question of communication. Nobody wants projects managers to slavishly stick to once posted needs, which turn out to be counterproductive. The core issue is how you communicate what is happening on the ground. One more example: Marcus Vetter, project manager from Cinema Jenin, recently told me that he didn’t use the donations received via betterplace for the „renovation of the 1st dozen of cinema chairs“ for the renovation of 12 chairs. This would have been impracticle and expensive. Instead he uses the first funds received to buy the material needed for all 500 chairs. The rest of the work will be done once the money has come together. I believe the majority of donors doesn’t care in which sequence the work is being done. What matters is whether the chairs will be renovated by the time the cinema opens ist doors.

“The few that dominate” vs. “The long tail” One of the most important influences behind the creation of betterplace.org was Chris Andersons theory of “the long tail”, which over the past weeks have come to our mind again and again. First for those of you who don’t know what the theory of the log tail is: in 2004 Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, published an article about the long tail.Anderson (who later expanded the article into a book: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More) developed the theory that with the rise of the internet, niche products would immensely gain in importance and would - taken together - create more profit than mainstream products. The long tail of music He illustrated this business dynamic with regards to the music industry. Before the arrival of the internet, “the music industry” consisted of a few thousand records by a few thousand musicians: all the records for which music stores provided shelf-space. With the internet this has dramatically changed: because there are no restrictions of space, the music industry has greatly expanded. Now a band which plays Psycho-African-Trance-Reggae (a real niche product) can produce songs (and sell them), because there might be 500 fans, spread all over the world, who are willing to pay for their CD (or buy their music on itunes). Combined these niche products generate more profit than the “old” music business. The long tail of charity The Long Tail was very influential for our thinking about betterplace.org. Very early on, Stephan reckoned that there was something like the “Long Tail of Charity”, i.e. that the combined donations - in money, kind, time or knowledge - going to the 40+ large aid organisations, such as World Vision, Care or Doctors without Borders, are smaller than the donations reaching a long, long tail of small, largely unknown social initiatives. And that it would be fantastic if this long tail could be made available to a really large group of people, who would than have the opportunity to get in direct contact with one another. With the internet, we saw the opportunity of making this “long tail of charity” available at no cost to a large number of users. Thus potential donors with very particular, niche interests, can now find exactly the initiative they want to support. An an anthropologist I have studied for a long time the highly differentiated life-styles of populations, in Germany as well as in Nigeria. Marketing experts divide populations into ever smaller and smaller niches, thus Claritas sees the Chinese-American population of San Francisco divided into five “clusters,” from Young Literati to Money & Brains. Why should we than assume that we would be happy to donate our money, time, and knowledge to “the usual suspects”, the smallgroup of traditional charities? Instead, if you have been on a holiday in Tanzania and experienced the hardship of women there (or the bashing and even killing of homosexuals) you may want to make a difference right there. Ideally on a global marketplace such as betterplace.org you would find the organisation who is working to ameliorate the plight of women (for example by donating to this charity) or who is advocating gay rights in Tanzania. I want to help the homeless As we wrote at the beginning, we are reminded of this theory again and again. Thus, when Angela, who is doing the data analysis for the project team, presented us with an overview of the German private donation market, she could identify approx. 240 charities as recipients of the 4€ billion donated annualy. These organizations received 48% of the 4€billion. The rest of the market - 52% - go to unknown organisations, probably medium sized, small and very small initiatives. Here it is: the long tail of help. We see it everyday, when new organisations register on our plattform, many of them (as yet) unknown to the wider community. And one more example from betterplace.org: some time ago a fundraising team had registered on our platform. Very quickly it gained real momentum (right now there are 406 team members, all of which have donated at least 1 €). The team was initiated by the makers of Pennergame.de, a German online game community. As Pennergame is about the homeless, the company sponsored 3 projects for homeless people in Hamburg and asked their game community to join them in their efforts. Our guess is that most of the players don’t belong to the conventional group of donors to charities. They came to support the projects, because the game they are playing is controversial, as it (so our children tell us) envolves impersonating homeless. Judging from the 500+ comments on the Pennergame blog featuring the projects on betterplace, they feel that by contributing to real homeless projects, players can claim not to belittle the plight of the homeless and be aware of the difference between online games and real life. On betterplace.org they found exactly the projects they wanted, can easily donate to them and experience that collectively they can raise substantial sums, even if the individual amounts are small. (In this particular instance, so far 10.179€).