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Rick Cohen of the Nonprofit Quarterly has a long interview with new Social Innovation Fund director Paul Carttar in which Rick questions the relevancy of the Fund to smaller nonprofits.
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Nathaniel Whittemore offers his take on the naming of Paul Carttar as the new director of the Social Innovation Fund.
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Researchers at Harvard analyze what has made Kiva.org so successful and reference my post about Kiva being "Made to Stick".
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Perla Ni of GreatNonprofits argues that the government should do away with tax deductions for religious donations and create deductions for volunteering.
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ABOUT SEAN STANNARD-STOCKTON
Sean Stannard-Stockton is the president and chief investment officer of Ensemble Capital Management, located in Burlingame, CA, midway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. From 2006 through 2012, Sean authored the Tactical Philanthropy blog and wrote regular philanthropy columns for both the Financial Times and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. In 2012, Sean officially ended the blog to focus on growing Ensemble Capital.
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One Comment
In response to the article: “Contagious Ideas: Crowd-sourced Microfinance and Cooperation in Group Lending,” I definitely think it’s useful for the author to have pointed out that performance of lending portfolios are better when managed by groups than by individuals. However, if we’re thinking in terms of IT strategy it may also be interesting to note Kiva’s ability to harness network effects in attracting so many people to its microfinance platform in the first place. By bringing its funding model online, Kiva has essentially enabled and empowered thousands of users to give in whatever ways they can. Considering the “long-tail” perspective, Kiva is using the internet to harness the purchasing power of a far greater number of people who can give in smaller amounts, and the sheer volume of donations ultimately makes for a significant contribution. Kiva’s online, crowd-sourced lending model is a smart implementation of information technology strategy and the non-profit sector could benefit from utilizing the internet as a platform to achieve network effects and establish economies of scale whenever applicable.