Tag: charity
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The Statistics of Wikipedia’s Fundraising Campaign
Yesterday, 15th January 2011, Wikipedia celebrated its tenth birthday. Just over two weeks before, Wikipedia was also celebrating the close of its 2010 fundraising campaign where over sixteen million dollars was raised from over half a million donors in just fifty days. The 2010 campaign was billed as being data-driven, with the Wikipedia volunteers “testing…
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Using Charity to Increase Voluntary Payments
If a business is experimenting with voluntary pricing (‘pay-what-you-want’ pricing), to increase sales and profits give a portion of voluntary payments away to charity (and advertise the fact, naturally). That’s the conclusion from a study by researcher Ayelet Gneezy comparing a number of pricing plans involving–in various combinations–voluntary payments, fixed prices and charitable donations: At…
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Reasons for Compassion and Charity
Tackling the idea that human empathy is self-serving, Dacher Keltner, for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine, reviews a number of studies looking at why we are compassionate. In other research by Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns, participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others…
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Charitable Donations: The Problem of Restricted Funds
By donating funds to disaster-specific charitable organisations and campaigns we restrict the use of our funds to the relief of that problem only. This can cause long-lasting issues for charities and worldwide disaster recovery efforts in the future. To ensure the charitable help best, the charitable should ensure they give unrestricted funds that are not…
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Rewards Corrupt Altruistic Tendencies
It has been known for decades that infants up to 14 months old will act on altruistic impulses without reward. Recent research, following on from a similar 1973 study, is starting to show that rewards could be responsible for the inhibition of this natural desire to help others—an innate altruism. 48 German toddlers averaging 20…
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Ending Foreign Aid to Africa
Foreign aid to Africa has turned the continent into a ‘giant welfare state’ and is one of the direct causes for the rise in poverty rates from 11% to 66% in recent times. This is according to African author and economist Dambisa Moyo as she adds her voice to the growing group of learned economists…
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Making Donations Easy
Each year, in late December, I make a charity donation. Over the years I’ve chosen a charity in many different ways, but one thing has always been constant: I always choose projects that aim to improve science education. However, one thing has been constantly improving: the ease of actually choosing, and this year it couldn’t…
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Why Local Content Matters
Google.org on helping technologically developing countries in Africa gain a global voice: allowing them to be producers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Today, Swahili books online for example, number in the hundreds compared to the hundreds of millions of books in English available online. What message does this send to young people about the relative…
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The Millionaire and the Squatter
Originally an idea for “professional philanthropic development”, Michael—a multi-millionaire who’s giving away $78m over a 10 year period—lived with a homeless Chicago man for one weekend. Freakonomics covers the story in Michael, Meet Curtis: Philanthropy Gets Personal. Curtis cooked another plate of chicken and beans. He was about to eat it, but once again he…
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Unsubscribe from Human Rights Abuse
Unsubscribe is an Amnesty International campaign asking you to ‘unsubscribe’ from the human rights abuses undertaken around the world in your name. Illegal detention and torture are just two of the acts that are common place in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, and guilty or not, people deserve better treatment than what they currently get…