Heard about it via Bruce Tate who’s apparently building it, and at first glance I’m very very impressed. ChangingThePresent is trying to bring web-commerce techniques to philanthropy, and off the top I can’t see why it won’t work. When it’s this easy to pick a cause, pick a vehicle, and throw a few bucks into the pot, why wouldn’t you do so every time you read a particularly grim headline or see a particularly horrifying picture? And lord knows there are enough lame presents exchanged this time of year. If they succeed in getting a feedback-heavy community built up around this, it could really be a new thing in the world. The jury’s out, obviously; but I’ll be watching.
Contributions
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From: lhe (Dec 15 2006, at 15:45)
another impressive example is http://www.kiva.org
using web technology for enabling non-profit microfinancing and thus being just one click away (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfinance)
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From: Robert Tolmach (Dec 16 2006, at 15:47)
Nice post on www.ChangingThePresent.org
Bruce Tate did a great job on it.
You might note that www.ChangingThePresent.org offers thousands of specific donation gifts from hundreds of leading nonprofits, so visitors can choose exactly what they want to accomplish. You can protect an acre of the rainforest or fund an hour of a cancer researcher's time. You can provide a child with a first book, an AIDS patient with life-saving drugs, refugees with shelter, or a hungry family with a nourishing meal.
Visitors can browse by cause, search by name to find almost any nonprofit, or peruse friends' wish lists and registries to find exactly what they would find most meaningful. They can then create personalized greeting cards, which will be mailed the next day to announce the donations made in friends' names.
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From: Bruce Tate (Jan 04 2007, at 06:14)
Thanks for the kind words. It's been an amazing experience for myself and the team. We've never moved this fast before. Now, it's all about building up volume. (We've built around 5% of what we intend to build, but what we have so far is, we think, compelling.)
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