Thursday 8 May 2008

Engagement2.0: Sexy Online Charity

Yesterday I was at a meeting organized by the German sustainability network 3plusX on "Engagement 2.0". Five fresh German online charity portals presented their work and vision. All of them intermediate online between concrete help projects and givers, may it be individuals or companies. All developed their web2.0 strategy to communicate the projects informative but sexy.

What I like about these portals is that they aim to make engagement easy, informative and concrete. For a lot of people a boarder to give money to charity is because they don't know what happens with their money. The charity culture in Germany is much less developed as in the UK or States.

A large part of the discussion was about how these portals generate their money. Some get their money over corporate sponsorship, while others take a small part of the collected money. Off course, both have good arguments.

The initiatives still have to prove what they are worth, but they are all the kind of projects realized with sweat and ideals. Just one critical question: is it really needed and workable to have so many different portals? Should they be concurrents or cooperate?

I am not going to give any ratings here, just look at them yourself and decide what you think of them:

Betterplace
Helpedia
Elargio
Reset.to
Netzwirken

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey! Thanks for all the great info. I was browsing through a bunch of green websites and blogs and I came across yours and found it very interesting. There are a bunch of others I like too, like the daily green, ecorazzi and earthlab.com. I especially like EarthLab.com’s carbon calculator (http://www.earthlab.com/signupprofile/). I find it really easy to use (it doesn’t make me feel guilty after I take it). Are there any others you would recommend? Can you drop me a link to your favorites (let me know if they are the same as mine).