Internet Giving Will Aid Small Charities as Well as Big, National Ones

To the Editor:

Andrew Blau, as usual, hits the nail on the head when he asks whether a big-gets-bigger world is “the revolution we wanted” from online giving (“Internet Giving: Not the Perfect Revolution,” November 1). He also rightly calls attention to several trends from the September 11 response effort demonstrating that powerful offline brands can become just as powerful — or even more so — online. However, his thesis that online giving will ultimately only benefit larger, well-established charities misses the mark, because he fails to consider four important pieces of evidence.

First, many smaller charities that supported relief efforts in New York and the Washington area were able to raise significant (for them) amounts of funding more easily online than offline. Yes, the Red Cross did receive just over 40 percent of all September 11-related online contributions; but that’s significantly less than the 60 percent of offline crisis-relief donations that went from individuals to the Red Cross.

What’s the difference between online and offline? Simply put, donors have more choices online. At least people online were likely to see organizations like the United Jewish Communities, the National Organization for Victims’ Assistance, and the North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, whereas, in the general media, those organizations were virtually invisible.

Second, lessons from online commerce tell us that while major, national offline brands can leverage those brands well online, the medium also supports strong growth, loyalty, and revenues for niche brands. That’s why small mom-and-pop businesses that have unique products and services — from artistically carved furniture to personalized nursery-music albums — are finding ways to grow and succeed online that were not available to them in the pre-Internet economy. Although online giving is currently several years behind the evolution of e-commerce, we can already see how the medium offers support for smaller organizations with an ability to claim strong and unique niches.

Third, the Internet enables people to link to local community organizations in a way that was inconceivable only a few years ago. Today, when CNN wants to connect viewers to a nonprofit organization following a story, it doesn’t need to flash a toll-free number for a national nonprofit. Rather, it can point viewers to Helping.org [a Web site operated by the AOL Time Warner Foundation, whose parent company owns CNN], where a viewer can find organizations right in his or her own community that need time or money. From movie listings to weather to news and traffic, the Internet has proven time and again its power to drive people toward finding local resources.

And, fourth, it’s important to remember that those who use Internet applications once and have a good experience are likely to use them again — and to use them in a more sophisticated way. Whether it’s online shopping, Web searches, personal-finance applications, or even e-mail, research shows that people become more comfortable over time using more functionality. So, it’s not surprising that after September 11, when most people were making online contributions for the first time, they overwhelmingly selected the name-brand charities listed on the first page. It also wouldn’t be surprising for people to become increasingly comfortable with using the educational and search functionality as they return to online giving over time.

Each of these pieces of evidence offers encouragement that the online-giving revolution will, indeed, lead as much to a democratization of opportunity for smaller nonprofits as it will to expanding opportunities for the big, national brands. What’s more important, however, than hypothesizing whether the Internet will help or hurt nonprofit democratization, is determining what we need to do to ensure that the revolution actually goes the way we want and that democratization results.

We should be looking forward to getting donors more comfortable online, getting better nonprofit information into the online databases, making charity search tools easier and more intuitive, helping more nonprofits across the digital divide, and so on. One thing we’ve learned from the Internet is that technology does not determine the outcome — people do. We need to work together to ensure that the Internet revolution is, in fact, all about democratization — all about making more nonprofits more central to more people’s lives.

David Eisner
Senior Vice President
AOL Time Warner Foundation
Dulles, Va.