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?

[Peter Deitz]

Thanks Paul. Let's take this conversation to the telephone lines. Let me know when a good time would be to call you. All the best, Peter

PS - Thanks for the thumbs up on our Ning site!

[Paul Lamb]

I like it in principal - seems doable! Have a few questions about how the card would work in practice, how to select giving platforms, and who the ideal customer is, but we can can walk through that later. Also want to do some more thinking about how such cards would be marketed...exciting stuff.

BTW, your ning site looks GREAT!

[Peter Deitz]

And the best part -- the sale of these giving cards (if we mark them up) would benefit a nonprofit -- perhaps Social Actions to start, but then we could rotate in other nonprofit giving platforms to receive the proceeds. This could be fun.

[Peter Deitz]

Hi Paul, Thanks for taking a look at the embedding philanthropy option in credit cards. And yes, you can donate your points from credit cards to a charity. What I'm interested in, though, is a credit card dedicated to giving as opposed to one that gives as consequence of getting. I did some research and Mastercard has a brandable gift card that a company can issue to individuals. My thought was to offer a storefront for giving people branded gift cards that can technically be used anywhere Mastercard is accepted but would come with 'packaging' that encourages the gift card to be used on a list of giving platforms which we list by name. What do you think? We could setup a PayPal storefront for the 'giving cards', get some branded material from CafePress, and then be off to a good start. Not sure what the appropriate legal entity should be for selling these giving packages. Thoughts welcome...

[Paul Lamb]

Peter: Just checking out some charity gift card and credit care options. Beyond offering a credit card that donates 1% of purchases to your org (Make a Wish Foundations and many others do this). You can give someone a gift card that allows the user to donate to the charity of their choice. See
TisBest as an example. I believe it is also possible for people to donate their points on a credit card to a particular nonprofit (not sure about this though). Finally, there is the Red Campaign model that acts as a branding aggregator for purchases that are tied to donations to a particular cause. Even Starbucks now offers a RED gift card that donates 5 cents everytime you use the card to purchase a coffee.

[Beth Kanter]

Love seeing this organizing going on!

[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?

[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]

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]

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.