DIANE: 'Tis the season to give, and innovators from many countries are making it easier than ever to match donors with recipients. At the UN on Tuesday, several examples of social stock exchanges -from India, Brazil, South Africa, the US and China - were on view. You've heard of e-bay. Well, Clam Laurenze is co-founder and vice president of operations at MissionFish, the non-profit that administers e-bay GivingWorks. Clem says MissionFish provides the tools, expertise and support to allow organizations and individuals to contribute to worthy causes in a variety of ways.
"Most notably, community selling, which is the ability for an individual to make a listing on E-bay and donate a portion of the sale price, as little as 10% and as much as 100%. And that's the principal product that E-bay users will leverage. We also let non-profits sell things on E-bay for free. E-bay gives back their fees to non-profits and so there's actually no cost for them. We call that direct selling."
DIANE: Clam Laurenze says MissionFish is beginning to experiment with other types of giving, for example, allowing buyers to add a $1 donation when they buy something to give to the charity of their choice.
"And that's where the power really comes from in my mind - the ability to pick a large organization that you care about, UNICEF, or a very small organization, a blind cat rescue in your hometown - each of those can benefit equally based on your passion and your willingness to support them."
DIANE: GiveIndia was founded in 2005 to help donors contribute to the burgeoning development sector in India. GiveIndia's CEO, Ujwal Thakar says there is increasing awareness among India's growing middle class of the need to give back to society. But there are obstacles to giving.
"...the biggest obstacle is distrust. People do not trust work done by the development sector. Lack of convenience in giving is another one. Inability to determine how funds are utilized. I mean if you give money to NGOs, you want to know whether the money was properly utilized and whether you'll get a report back on it, and inefficient mechanisms resulting in only 60% of the money reaching the NGOs...if you want to donate, the cost of fund raising for most NGOs in the country is as high as 30 to 40%, in some cases, it's even higher than that."
DIANE: So GiveIndia does a lot of the legwork for donors by screening NGOs and setting certain criteria of transparency and credibililty.
"You are to be a non-religious organization. The organization has to cater to the poorest sections of society. At least 50% of the beneficiaries have to be poor. More than two-thirds of the directors cannot be related by blood or marriage. Salaries and reimbursement of directors should be disclosed, and they have to publish their financial statements."
DIANE: On ebay, MissionFish also screens the organizations who receive funds, and lets them join the online social stock exchange for free. Clam Laurenze says the current difficult economy doesn't have to be an obstacle to giving.
"When the economy tightens, people have less income to donate. But what they still have is lots and lots of stuff in their closets. So you can donate that stuff effectively to UNICEF effectively by selling it on e-bay."
DIANE: Ujwal Thakar says it's still early days yet to measure the full impact of this new ease of giving, but one recent example, following floods in India, could just be a predictor of future success.
"We recently found we had a calamity in India - there were floods in one state called Bihar, and one of our internet banking partners just put up a webpage on their internet banking site for a week and 55 thousand donors donated a million dollars in just one week."
DIANE: The social stock exchange concept was first launched in Sao Paolo, Brazil in 2003. Since then, the Sao Paolo stock exchange has received more than 5 and a half million dollars in online pledges for 71 philanthropic organizations.
Producer: Diane Bailey
Duration: 4'00"