Supporters of a cause or charity want to know the destination of their donations, and non-profit organizations and donation platforms like charity:water, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva are answering that question with information and powerful storytelling and images. Furthermore, they are making it easy for their participants to share specific people and initiatives in need and the celebrate the successes along the way.

Examples include:

• Online microfinance platform Kiva.org posts on its website profiles of entrepreneurs, so lenders can see who they are donating to. There are also profiles of lenders in the community, and background information on the microfinance institutions that receive the donations and send them on to the entrepreneurs. Kiva also posts statistics and financial information online, with an explanatory section on “How Kiva Works”; and Kiva representatives say that there will be efforts for even greater transparency, including a contest for user-submitted videos about the Kiva model, after criticism that earlier versions of Kiva.org’s language suggested that lenders were indeed able to donate money to a particular entrepreneur (much like the “sponsor a child” charities of last century).

• Other fast-growing charities that try to illustrate where exactly donations are going include Invisible Children, a non-profit that spreads awareness about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, educational charity DonorsChoose.org, and charity: water.

• Invisible Children, for example, as part of its Schools for Schools campaign, blogs photos of schools being built thanks to donations from Invisible Children supporters.

• DonorsChoose.org posts photos and thank-you notes from the students whose classrooms received requested school supplies or were able to go on an educational field trip based on donations from the site.

• And on its web site, charity: water uses Google Earth maps to track progress of wells and other charity: project projects and their partners across the world.

Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest:  Social Media Blueprints 1.0

Jonathan Abrams

JONATHAN ABRAMS
CEO and Founder of Socializr

Twitter: http://twitter.com/abrams

Jonathan Abrams is the founder and CEO of Socializr, a new web service offering free online event invitations, and innovative ways to share event and party information with your friends. Jonathan is an award-winning serial entrepreneur who was hailed as “The Social Pioneer” by Vanity Fair in June 2008 for creating the pioneering social networking service Friendster.

TS: What do you think the public interest of social media is?

Jonathan Abrams: It’s hard to think of anything social media hasn’t had an impact on.  Business, entertainment, politics, non-profit. I think that it’s obvious that it has an opportunity to work for the public interest.

TS: And do you think that companies and governments have a responsibility to take that interest into account when they make decisions?

JA: I don’t think they necessarily have a responsibility. I think it’s more of an opportunity.  For government social media is definitely a channel for increased transparency. But they’re so behind in putting things on the internet – even without social aspects. There’s a lot of information that we still don’t even have access to.

TS: What do you think the greatest threats are to the way people use social media in terms of public interest?

JA: There are companies and other people who are simply taking data out of sites like Facebook without Facebook actually agreeing to it or being part of it. There are privacy implications and privacy dangers in that. That leads into identity theft issues – how do you verify that someone is who they say they are on social media sites – it’s very easy to impersonate somebody. There are dangers for young people in overuse – there are a lot of people who have got in trouble or lost jobs because of the use of social media; there may need to be some protection set up for those circumstances.

TS: Would you prefer more accountability in social media?

JA: I’ve been a fan in general of moving away from anonymity so we can see who people are online, just like we do offline. There is a place for anonymity, but I think it’s only needed in certain cases.

TS: When you started Friendster five years ago, did you ever imagine that social networking would help elect a president or enable a charity to raise money?

JA: No  – when I started working on Friendster in 2002, the idea of integrating your offline social context with your online experience was itself pretty weird. We weren’t sure that people were really going to do it – that they would bring their social graph online, and have these social network contexts in their online experiences instead of being isolated and random and anonymous. I was initially just thinking about it in the context of online socializing. The idea was to make the way I used the internet more like the way I interacted with people in real life.  You go to a party and you don’t just walk into a room of random strangers.  Everybody there probably knows somebody who knows somebody who knows you.    There’s a reason you’re there, there’s a reason they’re there, there’s some context. In coming up with these silly new ideas of how the internet might work differently, I wasn’t anticipating all the applications of it. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this could be used for politics, this could be used for charity or journalism.” It was more amorphous than that.