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» Donate 4 Minutes To Charity from Farts
If you have a few minutes today, you might want to help out a good cause. I found a website today that is designed as a recomendation engine for non-profit organizations. Basically, it works like Amazon's recomendation engine, where it [Read More]

Comments

Barbara Clarke

I was kind of surprised at how the dashboard didn't learn as it went along, and I think this relates to the causes vs organization issue. I rated a bunch of programs, and kept rating programs to do with animals as "not interested" (sorry folks) and every new portfolio I got had some sort of animal organization. The Pandora suggestion is a good one. Also, local vs domestic vs global is another way people decide.

Ryan Scott

This could be really interesting as a feature on another site, but surely its not a standalone product.

And definitely should be broken down based on cause, or at least take cause into account. I get the impression the algorithm just does 'you like x and y and bob like y and z, so you might like z'.

Ted Grigg

When I look at rating systems, I ask myself how the effort is funded. Here is what the rating organization says in its "About" page.

"The Donation Dashboard website is a pilot system that includes information on 70 non-profit institutions. If the system is successful, the developers hope to expand it with other features and partner with a third party that can streamline collecting and distributing funds."

Further on, the website states that this is a research project.

As the program matures, the "third party" will need to make money off of this effort.

If funded by the organizations, then there is the ongoing pressure to recommend those that support them financially and minimize the non participating non profits.

The only way to retain an objective rating structure is to have the users pay a small fee for the service. And that model probably will not work. The selling challenge may be too great.

So I wander how long this product will last.

One might look to Consumer Reports as the better model. But again, do the raters really know what they are doing?

As always, the devil is in the details even when the idea has great potential.

Thanks for another informative blog.

Ted

Sonia

Great point about cause vs. organization focus! As I go through the filter myself, I'm seeing organizations that I'm not fond of, but who work on causes I do support. This organization-based approach has major potential to skew results. Maybe they could take a page out of Pandora's book - potential donors can enter the name of an organization they already support, then based on the org's profile it can suggest some?

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