Donors building a web of trust

New studies

A number of studies have shown that many donors focus more on the act of giving rather than on its long-term impact in the above areas, Ramalingam noted.

“Givers often lose interest as complex messages start to filter through. How do you better involve the donor in the process of giving and responding to feedback and adapting their giving practices accordingly? I am not sure these websites do that yet…instead you get a snapshot of what has worked and what hasn’t.”

But Stockton said such feedback is nonetheless democratising the aid business.

“We’re not a long way away from the majority of beneficiaries having some kind of web access, so we need to become better at giving them (beneficiaries) some kind of quality-assurance.”

But the World Bank says broad internet access is still a long way off for most developing countries.

For betterplace’s Breidenbach, projects become viable only through building trust among project implementers, beneficiaries and donors.

“The control comes from the (online) community,” she said.

“If you have a critical mass of people involved, then you develop intelligent crowd-sourcing mechanisms…We don’t necessarily remove really silly projects — but they tend to get badly ranked.”

Though presenting projects on such forums opens well-established brand names to criticism, they are not shying away, said Breidenbach.

Drawn by online fundraising’s low-cost and efficiency, Care International, the German Red Cross and World Vision have posted on fundraising sites in recent months.

Experts estimate offline or traditional fundraising methods, such as direct mail campaigns, use on average one-third of fundraising revenue.

“These sites do have the potential to add a missing element to the accountability and transparency puzzle,” Ramalingam told IRIN.

“If the context is right, a well-articulated and timely bit of project feedback might well trigger an aid agency to change or improve something…but it won’t happen every time.