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Activism and Online Fundraising: Overview

By John S James

Summary: Why is fundraising so hard when millions of people want to help, and have plenty of surplus money between them -- thousands of times what AIDS and health activism would need? How could we provide better opportunities for giving?

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A Paradox

Funding remains a critical, eternal problem for AIDS and other health activists and organizations. Why is this so, when millions of people in the U.S. alone want to help and have plenty of unused discretionary money between them, thousands of times more than needed for solid AIDS and health activism? The critical bottleneck seems to be the scarcity of graceful, sociable, rewarding, efficient, transparent, and accountable "donation rituals" or occasions. People don't want to just toss money at an invisible need.

This article outlines new ideas for raising money online. The basic strategy is to offer creative occasions and opportunities, with recognition, competition, cooperation, companionship, and other structures and incentives, to people worldwide who already want to help and could do so. Donors will be able to see their money in action, immediately and concretely. At the same time, even supporters who cannot afford to give any money can make major contributions to the success of these fundraising campaigns, through social networking.

We focus on activism and information more than services, because no private fundraising can replace government commitment and good faith in dealing with an epidemic that has killed tens of millions of people. Government will not support activism or full information, and without them, who knows what governments will do or fail to do? Private funding can help people already well-placed to alert public and expert opinion in time, before mistakes become disasters.

For example, in June 2007 Philadelphia lost $2.4 million in Federal funding of the Ryan White AIDS program, apparently ending all Ryan White funding for translation and interpretive services, nutritional services, home healthcare, day respite care, rehabilitative care, complementary therapies, client advocacy, and buddy/companion services; at least half of the funds for psychosocial services; and smaller reductions for other programs, according to the Philadelphia Gay News [1]. Local people were kept in the dark, and the real decisions were made in Washington. If just 1% to 5% of the funding involved had been raised privately to keep the community on top of the problem as it developed, the outcome could well have been different, for Philadelphia and other cities too.

The central issue for donors and policymakers in funding nonprofits and activism is the difficulty of measuring what they really accomplish. So donors have a dilemma: they don't want to waste money, yet they don't want to micromanage either (especially outside their expertise). Business handles this problem by having markets establish prices based on many peoples' decisions. But market dominance has problems, too. It corrupts governments and institutions (in health insurance, see SiCKO), letting corporations use sovereign power entrench economic distortions, worsen inequality, and create wars for private gain.

Another problem for donors is that emergencies and needs are bottomless, but most people don't want to give everything they have away. So donors create arbitrary limits to protect themselves -- rewarding fundraisers for knowing how to get past these barriers, not for substantive results. Instead, well-designed occasions or rituals could let donors do what they feel like when they feel like it, providing more natural limits.

This series of four short articles outlines a mixed, business-plus-gift-economy approach to fundraising. For example, donors could buy online prepaid access to donated digital art in huge quantities (or any quantity), give it out through social networks as they wish, and take any unused money back if they want. Yet the end users whose decisions validate this kind of market do not need to have any money at all. And they are freed from payment-processing expenses and hassles as well, allowing low prices online. Our approach, which we believe is new in ecommerce, offers some of the advantages of a market, without the exclusion and inequity. It could open doors to wider public participation across class barriers.

This writer designed and wrote computer software for many years before the AIDS epidemic; we used that experience to look for ways to support AIDS Treatment News online without denying it to people who cannot pay. We found much more than we were looking for, and published it rights-free for anyone to use in open-source, educational, nonprofit, or commercial projects (see http://www.smart-accounts.org ). We show that both the software development and its introduction into popular use could prove unexpectedly easy.

This is the first article in our fundraising series of four -- each intended to be readable alone. The "fundathon" proposal, next, is easiest to understand; it suggests designing fundraising campaigns as massively multiplayer online contests or games, open to anyone in the world [2]. The third article, on selling digital art, may be the most important for fundraising [3].

Our final article in this series, on a new design for ecommerce, may be most important ultimately. But it can be hard to grasp the unfamiliar idea of online financial accounts that can reproduce at their owner's command, inherit any number of capabilities from ancestor accounts, and evolve on their own toward being more useful and attractive to people [4].

References

1. Region to Lose $2.4M in AIDS Funding, by Timothy Cwiek, Philadelphia Gay News, June 22-28, 2007, http://www.epgn.com/062207/1AIDScuts062207.htm

2. "Fundathon": Toward Massively Multiplayer Online Fundraising Games, AIDS Treatment News #422, http://www.aidsnews.org/2007/07/fundr-fundathon.html

3. Selling Digital Art in Bulk through Prepaid URLs, AIDS Treatment News, http://www.aidsnews.org/2007/07/fundr-url.html

4. Financial Accounts That Can Reproduce, Inherit, and Evolve, AIDS Treatment News, http://www.aidsnews.org/2007/07/fundr-reproduce.html

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