communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

1/07/2009

Charity made hard

If you log into wikipedia lately you get this huge message from Jimmy Wales himself asking for money (strangely enough just read somewhere that they have a new board of directors and a new chairwoman with nothing better to do than spend about 6 mil euros they have already raised). Anyway, what I am mainly concerned with here is that even if I wanted to make a donation, I would have to go through a lot of trouble.
Romanians do not have a charitable streak - obviously, we have been without money for such a long time we do not have the drive to give it our freely. But even with new stuff opening our eyes and with truly emotional causes coming up, it's really effing hard to make a donation. Online, it's basically impossible unless you want to go through the hassle of being rejected time and time again by PayPal because you live in a country with an awful record.
So, my question is this: why can't there be an integrated donation system. Basically like PayPal makes your purchases possible, this system would make a summary of all existing causes and donation requests and you only needed to log-in, make an account, register a card and donate whenever and wherever you felt like.
I want to give, really, but I don't want to try really hard to give.

PS: if there is such a thing, direct me to it. Jimmy needs my help.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

A solution would be to convince the mobile phone providers to open a free number for donations as some suggest: http://www.dragosdehelean.ro/2008/12/08/follow-up-campanie-de-donatii-sustinuta-de-bloggeri/, but with wiki's policy against advertising...I'd turn to SMS and micro donations: http://www.plataprinsms.ro/, http://www.mobilpay.ro/intrebari-frecvente.html?gclid=CL-B47jr_pcCFQFbtAodByb6Cg, etc. Although they're rather used as payment services than for donations,I incline to believe they wouldn't refuse an offer from Wikipedia, and could prove flexible.
Ok: accesibility (http://www.mobilpay.ro/demo/)
Sucks: If wiki would use mobilepay.ro par example - for every x euros you'd donate through SMS (plus the cost of the actual sms) 1.4 euro would end up in the service provider's pocket.
And still... i'd rather spend 5,7 euros, knowing that I'm actually donating only 3.6 euros, than go through all these trouble: http://www.moneybookers.com/app/, http://www.merchantinc.com/ (supposedly the better alternatives of paypal) .

mărie said...

Here's an idea: http://www.thebiggive.org.uk/

Haven't had the chance to check it out yet so I don't know if it's exactly what you were looking for.

But I read about it here http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/giving-web-generosity and I trust the source, in my opinion it's one of the best, if not the best, written magazines in the world.

Hope it helps :)

Bogdana Butnar said...

Thanks you guys!!

Corina Bordeianu said...

http://bucurenci.ro/2009/01/caritate-online/