Microfinance institutions are essentially crowdsourcing social good, as they connect investors with borrowers. Oftentimes, lenders will contribute small amounts to a particular project. For example, in the project pictured above, Margarita Lanoy is applying for a $125 loan to purchase more fruit to sell at her fruit stand in the Philippines. Lenders can lend as little as $25 to help her cause.
Direct Funding
While microfinancing focuses on providing loans and other financial services to the poor that must be repaid at some later point, there are many other crowdsourced funding opportunities that involve direct cash flow to communities, without the need to repay.
Crowdrise is one such platform that enables users to start or donate to fundraisers. Eleven-year-old Abby Hofstetter, for example, set up a fundraiser to raise $10,000 for Masbia, a kosher soup kitchen with four New York City locations. She reached her goal in 17 days and has since increased her goal to $25,000.
DonorsChoose is a site that enables American teachers to post project requests, ranging from a xylophone for music class to calculators for mathematics and science. In the end, the kids learn and the philanthropists get to see photos of how they helped out (along with homemade thank you cards).
While funding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo aren't exclusive to fundraising for cause-related projects, a fair amount of community-focused fundraisers can be found on each site. On Kickstarter, for example, Shawn Batey is raising money to produce Changing Face of Harlem, a film he has been working on for 11 years. With more than 200 hours of footage, the film promises to be "a unique contemporary historical piece looking at Harlem as you’ve never seen it before," bringing light to socio-economic challenges and improvements over the years.
Volunteering Online
Services like the Taproot Foundation, Catchafire and Sparked enable specialized professionals to donate their time towards projects that are in need of their skills.
With Taproot, individuals apply to specific consulting opportunities (such as "HR Generalist" or "Web Developer") and eventually work within one of those roles on a four to five person project team.
Unlike Taproot, Catchafire and Sparked list all current projects on their sites for users to choose from. Catchafire features a simple list of open projects that can be filtered by expertise (such as "Human Resources," "Social Media" or "Multimedia").
Sparked is unique in that it asks users to note their skills and what types of causes they are interested in. In turn, users receive a list of suitable "challenges" that might be a good fit. Sparked is based around the concept of microvolunteering; volunteer work that is convenient, bite-sized, crowdsourced and network-managed -- in other words, volunteering that fits into your schedule in small chunks of time, as chosen by you. Typically, the work is done via a computer or mobile phone, instead of in-person.
Crowdsourcing Knowledge
To fix a problem, one must first know about it. SeeClickFix is a great example of how active citizens are using crowdsourcing to report neighborhood issues. Of course, it's easier if everyone in a community is keeping an eye out for local problems, instead of a handful of people or organizations. That's the idea that SeeClickFix is all about.
Using the website, mobile apps, widgets or voicemail, users can report non-emergency issues -- such as pot holes on the street or the lack of recycling bins in a certain neighborhood. From there, citizens can vote on neighborhood issues or forward them on to people who may be able to help. In other instances, "neighborhood groups, elected officials and advocates monitor key issues, and publicly propose solutions on how to resolve them," states SeeClickFix's website.
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