Social Enterprise on the Web

Namaste from Mumbai!

I’m writing as our bus winds down the rainy road from Goregoan where we just had a delicious dinner, back to our hotel in Andheri East. For our first blog, Drs. Vyas and Parrish asked us to review some relevant websites that link individual donors with funding opportunities: Kiva, Global Giving, Samhita and the Global India Fund. Below I reflect on some common themes I noticed while perusing the sites:

Accountability. While individual donors are eager to lend their money, time and talents to deserving organizations, they are also increasingly savvy about their giving. Donors want to know that they are supporting reputable organizations that manage funds responsibly and have a measurable impact. All four sites make it easy for visitors to learn more about due diligence measures for assessing giving opportunities, vetting partners and providing assurances that donations will be well spent. Here are some examples I thought were particularly compelling:

• Kiva assigns risk ratings to partner MFIs (1-high; 5-low), allowing donors to better inform their lending decisions
• The “Global Giving Guarantee” offers donors a reimbursement in the form of a Global Giving voucher if they aren’t satisfied with their experience
• Samhita and the Global India Fund offer testimonials from a “Circle of Trust” – organizations and individuals who vouch for the trustworthiness of NGOs. Similarly, Global Giving uses a network of organizations, experts, and stakeholders to vouch for project sponsors.

Mobilizing supporters as multiplier agents for social marketing. The decentralized, individualized nature of each funding model lends itself to marketing through word-of-mouth and personal recommendations. Many of the sites are capitalizing on the prevalence of social networking, providing creative ways for supporters to drive additional supporters to sites through low-cost, web-enabled solutions:

• Global Giving provides a variety of options for supporters to add widgets to their own web pages, blogs, or emails (http://www.globalgiving.org/badges.html)
• Kiva provides supporters with a similar option, offering web banners to be added to supporter sites (http://www.kiva.org/do-more)
• Kiva encourages community members to create web applications, such as an iPhone app for monitoring lending portfolios. Such applications deepen donor involvement while increasing transparency through enhanced engagement with Kiva’s data.

Corporate Sponsorships. While each site prominently features partnerships with private sector partners, each organization is engaging with corporate partners in distinct ways:

• Kiva does an admirable job of describing each corporate partnership, with details on the partner and the nature of their support which includes grant giving, in-kind support, and technical support.
• In contrast, Global Giving frames its corporate engagement as a menu of services and benefits for corporate partners, such as facilitation of employee giving, branded online challenges and aligning giving with corporate goals.
• Samhita offers the most comprehensive approach to corporate engagement with a separate Corporate Social Responsibility Advisory branch that “provides end-to-end solutions for companies to plan and implement strategic CSR initiatives” (http://csr.samhita.org/about_csr.html)

While here, we have the privilege of speaking with Samhita staff and I look forward to learning more about their CSR branch in particular. We’re all looking forward to combining the theoretical analysis we’ve done over the past few weeks with on-the-ground experiences here in India. Our adventures continue tomorrow!

Until then,

Cara