The Seattle Foundation announced its new online giving site today. Community foundations have been rolling out this kind of information for several years now but this is different.
Disrupting Philanthropy is all about this kind of knowledge sharing. When we wrote On the Brink of New Promise in 2006 we said this kind of information sharing was going to be key. When I published Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets in 2004 I said this kind of information sharing was going to be key. When I first went to work for community foundations in 1990 I tried to find ways to share this kind of information.*
So why shout out about the Seattle site? It is not the first of these sites but it does do a couple of things right and worth noting:
- It is open to anyone - you don't need to be a community foundation donor to use the information. You don't even need to register or log in until you decide to donate.
- It is "social web" savvy - you can link to twitter, facebook, delicious, etc. from anywhere on the site. When you link to the organizations through Facebook, etc the links take you back to the Seattle Foundation Giving Center information. This should help donors, nonprofits and the community foundation spread information about their interests' quickly and using today's tools. It also positions the site to "power" all kinds of community driven, individually developed giving challenges, etc. It should help the information go viral.