In charity circles, people wondered about the motives of the Unitus board members, at least four of whom had invested in SKS Microfinance themselves and thus would reap profits from the I.P.O.

Continue reading…

It looks like we’re not done with affinity search engines.  Here’s the latest one I spotted, called Search and Share

SearchAndShare.org Google from Search and Share on Vimeo.

The fast growing and popular deal site Groupon has joined Charity Drive, to help groups of people get together to raise money for charity.

It is a new kind of philanthropy — the digital version of the public radio pledge drive, when businesses offer to match listener donations for a period of time.

The Pershing Square Foundation, which is affiliated with Pershing Square Capital Management, an investment firm, gave a matching grant of $400,000, and DonorsChoose.org’s board of directors pitched in another $100,000. Groupon users can buy credits for half price and the foundation will match the rest — a $20 credit goes for $10, a $100 credit goes for $50 and so on. DonorsChoose.org aims to give $1 million to schools through the partnership.

On DonorsChoose.org, donors could buy 100 writing journals for a teacher in an impoverished part of Nevada, for instance, or three calculators and batteries for an algebra teacher in Mississippi.

Continue reading…

Last month saw the latest Twitter foray into social good efforts with the launch of the new Hope140 initiative. Its #EndMalaria campaign over the past week featured the TwitPay platform for donations, creating a new call to action for Hope140. Twitter users participated in World Malaria Day by retweeting and donating $10. The Case Foundation matched donations with a $25,000 grant.

#EndMalaria demonstrated that Twitter can be more than an awareness mechanism for non-profits. Further, Twitter is using its Promoted Tweets feature as public service vehicle, launching with two charities; Room to Read, which is campaigning to promote the building of their 10,000th library, and Partners in Health. Now Twitter’s non-profit offering provides comprehensive capabilities, from click-throughs and retweets to bona fide donations and public service announcements.

Continue reading…

Impact Investing is a relatively new term used to describe philanthropy and charitable giving, but it implies that these projects require a return on the investment, although return requirements are much more lenient than what a typical financial investor would demand.  Here’ s a good New York Times article that delves into the topic at length:

More often, impact investing is described by what it is not. It does not work in the same way as socially responsible investing, which excludes areas a person does not want to invest in — like tobacco or guns — through a simple screening process. Impact investing focuses more on bringing about change — helping the working poor in India buy a home, for instance.

While most of the money is going into areas like helping to reduce poverty and improving the climate, it is not philanthropy. Investors expect at least a return of their capital with an adjustment for inflation and, in many cases, a lot more than that.

Continue reading….

It’s been slow going. About 1.6 million of the group’s laptops have been distributed to date, said Matt Keller, vice president for global advocacy at the O.L.P.C. Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass. Today, the largest concentrations are in Uruguay, at around 400,000, and Peru, at 280,000, followed by Rwanda (110,000) and Haiti and Mongolia (15,000 each).

Continue reading…

We’ve previously written about CauseWorld, an app that offers several ways to donate while you shop.  The new and improved app now incorporates the location based check in phenomenon.  Instead of checking in for gaming purposes as one does on Foursquare and Gowalla, CauseWorld let’s you connect to stores around you so you can use the points you get for checking in to support a variety of charitable causes.

Check out the complete review here.

A nice article on cell phones and the part they are playing to close the great tech divide:

The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, an intergovernmental organization. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.

And because it reaches so many people, because it is always with you, because it is cheap and sharable and easily repaired, the cellphone has opened a new frontier of global innovation.

Continue reading…