It looks like we’re not done with affinity search engines. Here’s the latest one I spotted, called Search and Share
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.
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).
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.
BusinessWeek reviews seven organizations that provide tools and services to analyze charities.
Enabling social change through analytics
Reading about Analytics X and thought I’d share here:
The Analytics X Prize is an ongoing contest to apply analytics, modeling, and statistics to solve the social problems that affect our cities. It combines the fields of statistics, mathematics, and social science to understand the root causes of dysfunction in our neighborhoods. Understanding these relationships and discovering the most highly correlated variables allows us to deploy our limited resources more effectively and target the variables that will have the greatest positive impact on improvement.
Current Contest – 2010 – Predicting Homicides in Philadelphia
Philadelphia is a city with 5.8 million people spread out over 47 zip codes and, like any major city, it has its share of crime. The goal of the Analytics X Prize is to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city. The ability to accurately predict where crime is likely to occur allows us to deploy our limited city resources more effectively. Full rules can be found on the Rules & FAQ page.
Browse For A Cause is a browser add-on that collects affiliate revenue (usually 3-5%) from sites like Amazon to help charities. For example, if you buy a $20 DVD, the affiliate revenue equates to about $1 which is donated to the charity of your choice. You can support as many charities as you’d like, and revenue will be split between them.
In the United States, cumulative online donations to charities could hit more than $4 billion during the holidays, according to a survey released Tuesday by marketing firm Convio. More than than 63 percent of those surveyed said they plan to donate money via the the Internet over the holiday season (November 1 through December 31, 2009), up from 51 percent in 2008.
Vittana, which beat out such well-known charities as DonorsChoose and people like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, is building a student loan business for microfinance institutions that cater to poor people in the developing world.It uses a model similar to that of Kiva.org, a nonprofit organization that funnels loans to individual borrowers through microfinance institutions. The method is to solicit individual lenders for money that will back loans to young adults seeking college educations.
