Recently in philanthropy Category

Max Gladwell dives into social media technologies such as Twitter, Facebook Apps, widgets, Ning and more, and shows how they can be harnessed for the greater good.

eBay has launched MicroPlace, a for-profit low-interest microloan site, aiming to provide funding to very small third world business owners, who historically repay their loans at a 98%+ clip, according to Tracey Turner, the site's founder who sold it to eBay last year.

"What gets me out of bed in the morning is the idea that when you invest in a person it really honors them and enhances their dignity as a human being," Turner said. "Which is different than a hand out."

MicroPlace follows on the heels of Kiva, a no-interest microloan site that has exploded in popularity, particularly since such pop luminaries as Oprah and Bill Clinton have touted the site.

(article source: Yahoo! News, photo credit ncassario)

FreeRice.com is an innovative little site where visitors participate in an endless vocabulary quiz.  A project of poverty.com, FreeRice re-loads a new page, with a new advertisement, every time the user answers a new question.  That cost-per-impression-based ad revenue is used to "end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free"  through a United Nations program.  Each correct vocabulary answer nets the program 20 grains of rice.

It's not much on a per-page basis, but it adds up quickly - over 11 billion grains of rice in the first two and a half months since the site launch.

The site is a loose derivation of one of the giant viral sites on the web, HotOrNot.com.  There, users upload their photos and visitors rate a random photo on a scale of 1 to 10.  Cycling through photos, visitors generate a tremendous amount of page views, ad impressions and presumably ad revenue.  HotOrNot boasts over 13 Billion votes counted and 32,649,000 photos submitted. 

Innovative marketing ideas are by themselves generally neither "good" nor "bad".  The intention and execution, however, is the difference between a vapid, narcissistic cash cow and a philanthropic, educational socially conscious contribution to society.