The Year of Living Givingly

[Paul Lamb]

Instead of setting a goal like "lose weight" or "excercise more" (although I could benefit from both) my New Years resolution is to "Give 10% of my $ and free time to good causes". Why? For three reasons...first, I have much to be grateful for and giving back money+time is a way of expressing that gratitude in real terms. Second, giving has beneficial psychological and health benefits. Third, I am curious to know if by setting a clear goal and being more conscious of my giving habits and patterns (by tracking it) I will become a better giver?

So I have set an arbitrary goal of 10%, something that I think is doable and relatively easy to measure. How will I measure it? I have put together a simple spreadsheet to complete on a regular basis. The sheet will track actual $ donations, time spent volunteering, and a more generic "nice things" that I do for people on a regular basis. For the sake of comparison, and to help me adjust my time accordingly, I also plan to track "work time" and "family/friends time". At any given time I can see how I am doing relative to my goal by checking $/time donated against earnings and available time for that week, month, etc.

Would love to hear from others about how you approach and gauge your own giving, along with any suggested tips? And have reserved the domain Givingly.org as a place where a personal giving tracking tool/widget/mobile app can potentially be built - unless a good one already exists? If interested in taking this on or folding into a related project let me know? Ultimately am interested in supporting the rollout of a kind of social credit card which allows individuals to track their borrowing and expending of social capital and giving. Would be cool to one day get a monthly social capital/giving statement in the mail, instead of banking and credit card statements, or a single statement that includes them all?

[Rose Vines]

I really like your idea of tracking your giving habits. In the past year I donated about 40% of my income and about 30% of my time to various causes (I have this sneaking suspicion I'm a donation junkie). I don't think that's sustainable over a long period, but I'd like to hone my giving so I can maximise it in the long term. Being more analytical is really a necessary starting point for doing that.

I'm not sure how successfully I'd be able to track work time, giving time and family/friends time. There's quite a lot of overlap among those for me.

[Paul Lamb]

Thanks Rose. Wow, your giving "stats" are impressive! My hope is that some better tools can be developed to help all of us (donation junkies or not) figure out how to best to give in a manner that makes the most sense for us based on capacity and interest. As you say, tracking family and friends time is a tough one and likely not relevant for everybody given our integrated work/life patterns these days.

[Rose Vines]

I wasn't trying to dazzle you with my stats. :-) I gave the figures because I realise how I haven't kept track, even though giving in this way is clearly a central part of my life. I think your idea of analysing giving really could help me be more effective with both my time and my money in the long run.

[Beth Kanter]

Paul, thank you for the birthday donation. And, also for this idea - it's great. Wow, Rose Vines - your giving is impressive. My giving is about 25% ... hoping to do more this year.

[Beth Kanter]

PS just posted a link over here in my thank you ..
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2009/01/facebook-birthday-causes-more-learnings-thanks-yous-1124-raised.html

[Paul Lamb]

Beth: You are most welcome! You also are a "giving junkie" - and I mean that in a good way ;-)

[Peter Deitz]

I included your post in our latest round-up:
http://blog.socialactions.com/profiles/blogs/social-actions-roundup-21-the

Yes, I really like the idea of a giving meter. This kind of application could be developed for our Change the Web Challenge. It's difficult to automate, but if people were up to the task of entering manually how they have given their time and service, this could work out well. I've also thought about creating a Social Actions giving card that would work our 40+ partner sites. The statement from these cards would read much like what you described (minus service).

Automating the tracking of donations and volunteering across platforms is the trickiest part of online action to the next level. I'd be happy to partner with anyone interesting in developing an open-source cross-platform 'living givingly' tool.

[Paul Lamb]

Peter: A giving card strikes me as a great way to activate this. Not sure how to do this but I'll keep you posted if anyone steps forth to work on a "givingly" tool that might lend itself toward the development of a giving card.
I don't think most people will want to manually track their giving, so will keep thinking and keeping an eye out for a better/easier way to do this. Please let me know if you come across anything interesting on that front. And of course I'll let you know how my own tracking experiment plays out...

[Peter Deitz]

Well, we could start with a very simple Social Actions- or Givingly-branded gift card that's powered by Mastercard. Technically, the card could be used anywhere mastercard is accepted, but the surrounding language would encourage people to use it on the action platform websites. I don't know of a givingcard that automatically notifies Facebook, Twitter, etc, but that would be even cooler. I'll do some research on my end.

[Paul Lamb]

Love it...I don't of any of the major credit cards that issue a giving report OR that are able to be configured with a social networking platform for reporting and encouraging specific giving actions. Gotta be something like that through the Red Campaign, etc. though...lemme know what you find?