fundraising

In the wake of the earthquake that struck Yushu, Qinghai Province, on Wednesday morning (April 14), how are organizations utilizing the internet in their response to the crisis? Here are a few that I am aware of so far:

• Google has set up a crisis response page with a map, a "person finder" database, and online donations to three international NGOs.
• Local organization Gesanghua, which we wrote about only last week, have started an appeal on their website, and have already raised CNY 700,000 in donations.
• An foreign organization working in the area called Plateau Perspectives has very quickly set up a website at YushuEarthquakeRelief.com (note that there appear to be some problems accessing this website from inside China at the moment).
• Another foreign organization called Machik has also started an appeal, and has just added a project to the online philanthropy website GlobalGiving.org (which is currently featuring it on the homepage).

A week ago, Liang Shuxin announced on his Sina microblog that he was starting a campaign, branded with the hash-tag #铅笔换校舍# ("swap a pencil for a school dormitory"), to raise money for a rural school by repeatedly swapping items with other microblog users.

Starting with a ordinary pencil worth CNY 1.00, he has already swapped up through an electric rice cooker, a printer, and a genuine A.C. Milan football uniform. He plans to auction the final item online, donating all proceeds to Foding Village Primary School in Guangxi Province. Other microbloggers have also joined the campaign, offering items for auction or exchange, including celebrities such as Phoenix TV news anchor Zeng Zimo.

Liang Shuxin recently wrote about his experience (link in Chinese) for Southern Daily's website.

Although this blog focuses primarily on the mainland, it is interesting to make comparisons with the nonprofit technology field in Taiwan. Yahoo! Taiwan's philanthropy homepage is similar in style to mainland sites such as Tencent Gongyi and Yeepay Gongyiyuan, allowing immediate online donations as well as ways to donate goods or become a volunteer.

Compared to mainland sites, it offers a greater level of detail and choice in the break-down of funding: most projects list several funding areas, and donors contribute directly to one of these areas rather than to the project as a whole. This increase in the donor's degree of involvement is likely to improve the overall giving experience. Likewise, projects in need of volunteers or donated goods also list these requirements in detail.

Yahoo! Taiwan's online donation platform also pre-dates the mainland sites, having been launched in mid-2005. In contrast, Yahoo! China offers no similar services, although it does have a philanthropy channel offering the latest nonprofit news and links to nonprofit project homepages hosted on Yahoo! (although at the time of writing, these links appear to be broken).

Nanfang Daily reports (link in Chinese) that Alipay, China's biggest online payment platform, is already providing its services for free to almost 50 non-profit organizations. This is particularly interesting, given that the demographic profile of Alipay users (higher than average income and education levels) suggests that they are also more likely to give to charity.

Non-profit organizations using Alipay for online donations include Project Hope, Red Cross Society of China, and the China Charity Federation. As previously noted on this blog, Chinese law only permits organizations registered as foundations to publicly seek donations.

A couple of months ago I talked about online donations in China, a field that is developing rapidly but remains an option only for registered foundations, not ordinary NGOs.

Raising funds for work in China by targetting donors in other countries, on the other hand, has no such barriers. Seeking online donations could be as simple as using a bank account outside China to register for PayPal, and putting a PayPal link on your organization's web page. However, do not expect this to attract a great number of donations unless you already have a lot of visitors to your website.

Another option is to promote your organization or your project through one of the many online philanthropy websites that have appeared in recent years. For example, GlobalGiving currently features 12 projects in China. NGOs registered in China are eligible to nominate themselves for this website, after which they will go through stringent due diligence checks.

A similar website is UniversalGiving, which currently features 44 different projects or gift packages in China. An important difference, however, is that this website partners with U.S. based nonprofit organizations who perform work in other countries.