"Amazing things will happen, if you just ask," said Pim Techamuanvivit, aka Chez Pim, the creator of Menu for Hope, and a speaker at last night's Net Tuesday in San Francisco. It was by asking that she got food bloggers and other food lovers to donate raffle prizes to Menu for Hope like tea with Harold McGee, coffee with Thomas Keller, and dinner with Eric Asimov. And it is working. As of this writing (5:15 PM PST) the Menu for Hope campaign has been up for about 3 days and has already sold $12,510.00 in raffle tickets to benefit the UN World Food Programme. Techamuanvivit attributes the campaign's success to, "Community with a capital C." Most of the people who donate and bid on the prizes are part of the food blogging community.

Matt Flannery also started Kiva by asking his community for help. He and his wife emailed their wedding guests and asked them to fund seven entrepreneurs in Africa. Kiva, "grew in concentric networks of community," Flannery said. They are presently providing $20,000 a day in loans to aspiring businessmen and women who are working their way out of poverty.

The audience had more questions than we had time for: Have you ever had prizes not be delivered? How do you prevent fraud? How do guarantee that the entrepreneurs are reputable? Both speakers explained different ways that they protect their donors, but in the end their answers were the same. Trust. Kiva chooses their lenders through recommendations from highly regarded microfinance institutions (MFIs). Techamuanvivit "knows" all of the people who donate prizes through the food blogging community. Neither project can 100% guarantee that all of their loans will be paid back, or that all of the prizes promised will be delivered, but so far their track records are good. Kiva has had a 0% default rate on their loans and Menu for Hope only had one prize not be delivered because of a shipping problem--you are not allowed to ship salt to Italy. "I guess they have enough salt in Italy," said Pim smiling.

The idea of microfinancing — small-scale loans to the entrepreneurial-minded poor — reached the front page this fall when the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize. But now the San Francisco-based nonprofit Kiva.org may have taken the idea a step further: with just a few clicks of the mouse, most everyone can become a microfinancier.
--Sonia Narang, New York Times 12/10/06

 

Today was an exciting one for our two SF Net Tuesday presenters. Matt Flannery's organization, Kiva, was in the  New York Times, and Pim Techamuanvivit launched her 2006 Menu for Hope campaign.

Are you looking for new fundraising models that are fun, engaging and use the social web?  Come hear Matt Flannery, CEO and Co-Founder of Kiva.org, the first Web site to let anyone with a PayPal account be a "banker to the poor", and Pim Techamuanvivit (Chez Pim) a food blogger who raised $17,000 for UNICEF with her 2005 Menu for Hope campaign.