Distributed Funding - Keeping Track Of Online Giving

A number of online giving aggregators - sites that either track or bundle online donations - have sprung up recently adding even more momentum to the idea of distributed funding.

[photo credit: jenn_jenn]

A recent post at Xconomy points to three such sites:

• Givvy - providing online tools that give individual donors “more control and more empowerment over why, when, where, and how they give to charities.”
• Jackpot Rewards, a site that will donate half of its after-tax profits to children’s charities
• Good2Gether - (which I've posted about before) a “hyperlocal giving aggregator”—an advertising-supported, keyword-based widget designed to appear alongside news stories on the websites of major regional media organizations, where it displays information about local non-profit fundraising campaigns or volunteer opportunities related to each article...."the non-profits get to make their pitch to a lot of readers, the newspaper website gets some ad revenue, and the advertisers get the glow of being associated with a humanitarian cause."

All three of these sites (and there are many others doing similar things) have a slightly different take on distributed funding, but all three share the idea that small donations can be combined to create meaningful impact.

For non-profits that have been in the habit of focusing on large, institutional donors for the bulk of their fund raising revenue, the model is changing. Not immediately, but sometime soon, the long tail theory will alter the face of traditional fund raising. Organizations that get ahead of this curve will benefit tremendously from it.