Friday, September 14, 2007

Nonprofit tech toolkit

Read/WriteWeb focused on charities and nonprofits this week. The site features a toolkit and a useful discussion on the "most successful" nonprofit uses of the web. Check it all out here.

The analysis is primarily about how nonprofits use the web to raise funds, get the word out about what they do, or streamline their operations. On the other hand, the successes that are highlighted, such as Kiva, fundamentally rely on web technology - without it they wouldn't exist.

This latter category is more interesting to me. By taking an existing concept - microlending - and re-creating it on a web platform, Kiva changed the very nature of the microfinance market - in terms of who participates, how they participate, and how quickly the new structure can scale.


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