Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 1 | Hands Across the Internet: How Nonprofits Reach Out Online, page 2

Nonprofits Without Borders
Two factors have helped fuel the growth of Internet-oriented nonprofits. One is really a bunch of factors—or more specifically, a bunch of disasters. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina all galvanized online givers, Craver says, and helped charities recognize the power of the new medium. A second factor has been the rapid rise of Internet commerce. “Until a medium is used in commerce, it generally isn’t terribly effective in charitable giving or even advocacy,” Craver observes. The analogy is to direct mail: the tactic was pioneered by business and later widely adopted by charities. And while the Internet was originally mostly the province of young men, it is now used by women and older people as well, making it much more useful for nonprofit fundraising. “Most organizations get their contributions from the 45-to-65-year- old segment,” Craver explains. “Now the Internet is used across all demographics.”

Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that Internet-based charities are springing up. They range in size from the relatively tiny ACOR, right up through Network for Good, an Internet donation facilitator that has raised tens of millions for other charities and has the backing of such Internet heavyweights as Yahoo Inc. Some of these new Internet philanthropies use the power of the World Wide Web to connect and motivate people; volunteermatch.org, for example, connects people who want to give their time to organizations that need help. Other Internet nonprofits, such as the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), which is supported in part by Carnegie Corporation of New York, provide important information that the marketplace doesn’t. CRP makes available free campaign finance information at www.opensecrets.org.

Carnegie Corporation has funded several such ventures, all of them in keeping with its longstanding focus on building democracy by fostering an informed citizenry. When books were the main repositories of knowledge, Carnegie Corporation funded public libraries, helping establish the innovative idea that everyone ought to have access to printed knowledge—and that providing such access is a proper civic function. Later, the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television (underwritten by the Corporation) produced a landmark report that led to the creation of the public broadcasting system in 1967, thereby enlisting the relatively youthful technology of television for educational purposes. Among other initiatives in this realm, the Corporation also commissioned a study by Joan Ganz Cooney that led to the creation of the Children’s Television Workshop (now known as Sesame Workshop)—and its most renowned program, Sesame Street.

Geri Mannion, chair of the Corpora-tion’s Strengthening U.S. Democracy Program, notes that toward the end of the 1980s the Corporation helped fund Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan venture to let voters dial an 800 number for information that might help them make more informed choices at the polls. Over the years this telephone initiative has evolved into a web site, vote-smart.org, that contains information on campaign finances, voting records, candidate biographies and other material.

More recently, the Corporation has been a major supporter of GuideStar (www.guidestar.org), which makes available on the Internet reams of information about thousands of nonprofits all over America. GuideStar, also a nonprofit, slices and dices the information in so many ways that commercial users of the site actually are willing to pay for it, helping offset the cost of what GuideStar provides for free. And it’s hard to conceive of GuideStar doing what it does in the absence of the Internet.

Carnegie Corporation has also been a supporter of Action Without Borders and its web site, www.idealist.org. Founded in 1996 by Ami Dar, a former Israeli paratrooper who grew up in Latin America, idealist.org is a great example of how Internet nonprofits can leap across time zones, borders and oceans—in this case by providing information on more than 54,000 nonprofit organizations in 165 countries. Idealist.org also serves as a clearinghouse for employment and volunteer opportunities in the nonprofit sector. For example, a young Canadian looking for a chance to do the world some good—and work on her Spanish—could sign up for e-mail alerts about summer volunteer opportunities in South America. She could even set up a volunteer profile for herself listing her talents, training and interests, so that nonprofits looking for volunteers can come to her.

Internet-oriented nonprofits fall into several broad (and broadly overlapping) categories. Herewith a look at several, each of which embodies a slightly different aspect of the phenomenon.

Fundraising: Using the Internet for raising money would seem the most natural thing in the world, but smaller nonprofits don’t have the resources. And any nonprofit should be concerned about potentially cannibalizing existing donors, who might have given the old-fashioned way without all the bother of a web site. Enter Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org), which lets users donate money to nonprofit organizations from its web site but also offers nonprofits the ability to post a “donate now” button so that visitors to their web sites can become instant donors. The basic “donate now” function is free, although Network For Good deducts three percent of all donations for transaction costs. Some 4,500 nonprofits now use its tools, it says.

Network For Good, which today has 21 employees, was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks with funding from the AOL Time Warner Foundation and AOL, Inc.; the Cisco Foundation and Cisco Systems, Inc.; and Yahoo. One of its strengths to this day is enabling people to donate at times of crisis. In May, for example, when a major earthquake struck Indonesia, Network for Good gave visitors the ability to give money right on its home page. Clicking “donate” in the “help quake survivors” box brought up a page listing a collection of charities, including Doctors Without Borders USA, Oxfam and Unicef, pulled together by the Network for Good staff—and screened to exclude fly-by-night operations.

“Crisis giving is not like other giving. It’s analogous to impulse purchases in the for-profit sector,” explains Bill Strathmann, Network for Good’s chief executive. Impulse giving is encouraged by the placement of Network for Good “donate now” buttons next to AOL’s and Yahoo’s presentation of news articles about disasters. As Strathmann puts it, “There, next to the heart-wrenching photos of the disaster, is a way to give.”

Network for Good’s role in crisis donations is one reason its executives believe the site increases total giving, rather than just diverting money that might otherwise have been donated via the postal service. Another reason is that the average donor who gives via Network for Good is 39 years old, which is “quite young” in the nonprofit world, according to spokeswoman Katya Andresen, who says that in 2005 Network for Good brought in $32 million for charities in 211,000 transactions. “Every dollar we spend brings in $9 for charities,” she said.

Next page: Maintaining an online nonprofit is usually more expensive than it seems. In addition to manpower, software, programming—even the cost of electricity to run computers and servers—all adds up.

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