Milaap creates sustainability by blending crowdfunding and micro lending

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, journalists, general public.

Icould begin this post by regurgitating any number of statistics on the sensory and information overload we all experience these days, but I won’t. We all know that that’s the world we live in. Technology has really broken down barriers to information and while that’s mostly a good thing, it can be really overwhelming as well.

As a result, breaking through the digital clutter these days is tough. So what do you do when your cause depends on you doing just that? How do you make sustainable giving a reality, so that both your cause and supporters benefit?

Milaap (disclosure: my client) is a unique online platform that blends crowdfunding with micro lending, giving people from around the world the ability to both lend and/or create personal fundraisers for India’s working poor. These micro loans – which start as low as $25 and are repaid in full at the end of the loan term – fund projects in fields as diverse as energy, water, and education. To date, Milaap has a 98% repayment rate, which is quite remarkable.

Here are three ways Milaap is socializing and changing the face of giving:

1. Anyone who gives through Milaap can set up a fundraiser for a project they are touched by. But here’s where it gets interesting; you can make these fundraisers social. In other words, you can bring your community in, asking them to join you in lending to this specific project, telling them why. So, all of a sudden, you don’t just have one person fundraising, you have 3, or 6, or 19… the possibilities are endless! Takeaway: Many hands do make light work. When you encourage people to involve their communities, you grow your own at the same time. This is what has enabled Milaap, over the last four years, to raise $1.6 million, give out almost 13,000 loans and take close to 50,000 people from oppression to opportunity.

2. What I really like about giving through Milaap is that the money you give is a loan—not a donation. While this in no way negates making donations to nonprofits, I think it’s a really smart approach. With the immense donor fatigue we all experience, it’s refreshing to know you will get your money back once the loan matures (unless you choose to relend it, of course, which many people do). As a small business owner myself, I love that approach, as there is accountability built into the process. Takeaway: Elevate your supporters’ investment of time and energy in your cause. Showing them the end-recipients are equally invested is a great way to do so.

3. The best way to touch someone’s heart is by telling them a story. And Milaap has great stories to tell—of its borrowers, of its supporters, of its employees and partners. It has a really rich content bank, especially of visual assets. But what it does very well is let its borrowers stories speak for themselves. I defy anyone to not be moved by the video above we put together for its flagship campaign in 2014, the #HopeProject. Takeaway: Stories work best when they come straight from the source. As much as possible, let those in your stories tell them.

Today is Milaap’s fourth birthday. To celebrate, it is hosting a round-the-clock, global online conversation on sustainable giving, and I do hope you’ll join. Here’s more on today’s #Milaap4Hope event (it’s very easy to join, just log onto the respective platform based on which event catches your fancy, and follow/use that hashtag).

If we all do our part, we can change the face of giving.

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By Katrina Heppler, envisionGOOD.tv
and JD Lasica, Socialbrite

Last week, guests at the Digital Summer event in San Francisco “planted” 940 trees in Honduras with the help of partner Mokugift. Co-founder Hans Chung (whom we met at two previous awareness2action events) was in attendance, showing off on his laptop the site’s global reach: You can plant trees in Central America, Africa, Asia — countries such as Belize, Haiti, Nicaragua, India, Cameroon, Ethiopia — for a donation of just $1 per tree. Since the site’s launch, more than 75,000 trees have been planted.

We have a long way to go: Through its Billion Tree Campaign, the United Nations Environment Programme is calling on citizens globally to plant 7 billion trees. That’s one tree per person. As the site says, “Ordinary people can fight global warming.”

UNEP has partnered with Mokugift to make it easy for everyone to plant a tree. You can help spread the word through social media, including embeddable widgets like the one below. Mokugift tracks how your inspiration spreads from one friend to another friend, and to subsequent friends (3 degrees). You can see the total number of people you inspired and the total number of trees planted by them. For every 10 trees planted by people inspired by you (all 3 degrees), you will get a free tree.

As the site points out, “Sharing the inspiration with your friends is as important as planting a tree yourself.”

Katrina recently caught up with Hans at a cafe in San Francisco’s Union Square. In the video above, hear what Hans has to say about Mokugift and the UN program.

Remember, it costs only $1!

Plant a Tree

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Tim Ferriss, author of the best-seller The Four-Hour Work Week, appeared today via uStream at the Inbound Marketing Summit during the session “How to Create a Worldwide Social Media Phenomenon.”

He took questions from the audience, and I asked how he decides which causes to support.

It wasn’t an idle question. Ferriss has become a remarkably adept advocate for philanthropic causes in a startlingly short time. He has successfully made use of social media tools to raise thousands of dollars to build schools in Vietnam, libraries in Nepal and India, and most recently, to help thousands of classrooms in the U.S. obtain basic classroom supplies. (Source: WalletPop)

Tim singled out three organizations and initiatives as exemplars of philanthropy in the age of Web 2.0:

• Donorschoose.org, the remarkable organization founded by Charles Best (I did a video interview with him Monday and hope to post it soon). Ferriss, who sits on the organization’s board, said the ability for users to select the specific educational causes they support and to receive tangible feedback are key drivers of its success.

• Roomtoread is a global organization that has established more than 7,000 libraries in the developing world since 2000.

• Charity: water, the nonprofit that was the beneficiary of the Twestival event in 205 cities, is representative of a new breed of charitable organizations, he said. Some of these groups have smartly begun to set up an administrative structure in which 100 percent of donated funds go directly to the cause, with a separate fund, generated through other means (such as a small add-on to support the group’s operations), paying for administration.

Seeing the first-hand results of your donation — whether it’s a Google Earth shot of the new drinking well drilled in Ethiopia for $5,000 or the plaque on the front door of a new school built in Vietnam — is a powerful incentive for individuals to participate in the culture of giving.

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Leila Chirayath, founder and CEO of Samasource, has been popping up at nonprofit events everywhere lately. Samasource is a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley that connects small and mid-size businesses with individuals and firms in the developing world that can perform outsourcing work (such as data entry) in a socially responsible way.

They now have pilot programs in Kenya, Nepal and rural India, and their goal, as their website says, is “to catalyze sustainable economic development and poverty alleviation by creating a thriving, active market for socially responsible outsourcing to developing regions.”

The 4-minute interview was conducted on a very windy day at the 2008 Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp in San Mateo, Calif. (though I do need to get a fabric microphone cover). I caught up with Leila a few minutes before her jam-packed talk. As Leila says, there’s a lot of misinformation in the media about outsourcing, and Samasource can help you sort through the best options.

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• 2009 fbFund Winner Samasource Gives Work, Not Aid (insidefacebook.com)

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