Charities go on-line en masse
WINNIPEG, MB - Charities are about to enter the fast lane of the information superhighway. A new website directory called Charity.ca (www.charity.ca) will let people donate on-line to their favourite charity with just the click of a mouse. No mail, no phone calls. Donors will even instantly receive a charitable receipt via e-mail.
"Canadians are generous people. They're looking for research on good causes and ways to help," says Vaughn McIntyre, CEO of Charity.ca. By going to a community of donors right in their living rooms, organizations have direct instant access to potential donors, he told charity directors during a Winnipeg stop of a cross-Canada publicity tour.
With religious charities making up the majority of charitable giving, this may represent a major shift in the way church and para-church organizations appeal for money.
The site launched officially at the end of April. It lists hundreds of Canadian charities with links to each charity's mission, history and, of course, the option to donate using a credit card. Charities are grouped into a dozen sectors such as environmental, cultural, animal rights, development or religious causes. Potential donors can also do a topical search or browse through an alphabetical listing of causes.
While larger charities might be afraid of losing donors to a competing organization with a similar cause, smaller charities see it as a level playing field, says McIntyre. A standard information page for each charity lists how the organization spends its money.
That transparency will force charities to be more careful about how they manage their budgets and contribution campaigns, says Susan Barkman of FineLine Communi-cations, which helps charities manage giving campaigns. She adds that the Internet puts the onus back on charities to attract new donors rather than assuming ongoing support from regular donors.
"The day of entitlement [for charities] is long over," says Barkman.
Churches wary
Still, religious organizations seem wary of the technology. Of the dozens of church organizations invited to the information seminar, none showed up. Hospitals, food banks and vicitims' groups, on the other hand, were well represented.
Participant David Neufeld, development director for Concord College, says the site likely has more potential for aid-type charities than educational institutions.
"If someone's watching the news, and there's a story about a disaster like a famine or flood, people might be moved to log onto the website and donate right there," says Neufeld. With a college, it's more about building long-term personal relationships with donors, he says.
Though the purpose of the site is to raise money for charities, Charity.ca itself is a commercial venture initiated by Toronto philanthropist Richard Ivey with funding and technical advice from NRG Group Inc.
While it's free for charities to be hosted on the site, charity.ca takes eight cents of every dollar donated through the site. That's significantly less than traditional fundraising efforts like direct mail and phone solicitation for which the industry standard is around 26 cents per dollar raised, according to data from the Centre for Voluntary Sector Services.
Among other features of the site are a personal profile which keeps record of a donor's annual donations so far, and news and calendar updates of a donor's favourite cause.
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